Sara > Recent Status Updates

"Perfection isn't possible, but change totally is."

"Some of us are more inclined to overthink. But that is the starting point, not the last word. That is where we begin, not where we're destined to end up."

"and anyhow travel is over, like one's books and the rest of civilization"

“‘If one could really completely imagine the full horror of the struggle all of the time - I suppose life would be unsupportable,’ she wrote. ‘As it is, moments of realization are bad enough.’”

""But he was there, somehow, even if just in our memories of him - he was there because his absence was there."

"Maybe we were all pretending to be fine because the world gave us no other option."

"the last time she would ever watch her child feed himself. That act of putting nourishment into his body - it was such an alive thing to do."

"'Do you believe in reincarnation?' I ask him.
'I'm not sure my belief matters,' he says. 'If it is, it is, whether I believe it or not.'"

"I couldn't figure out if something was wrong with me or if this was just my life - if this was just how people felt, like concrete was dragging their flesh off their bones."

"Sometimes if felt like he had stopped listening to her years ago ,and she just hadn't noticed. Like they were living in two separate worlds that happened to be under the same roof, pressed against each other, but never spilling, never overlapping."

“She laughed. ‘It’s not raining.’
‘It’s raining inside me,’ he said, and a wave of darkness took over.”

“Maybe she’d been sanded down to dullness by grief and prayers that went unanswered.”

“I once tried to beat her at a foot race but it was useless, she moved like the ground was falling away beneath her feet, the future rushing toward her. So I stood back and watched her race all the other boys in the area who thought they could take her on.”

“Fresh starts were good; that separateness was where you could feel yourself, where you could learn who you were apart from everyone else.”

“and if he enjoyed waging the war let it be remembered that he understood the anguish of it as well.”

“Young people were reluctant to contemplate death without having shared their bodies with someone else. It was sex at it’s sweetest: not for money or marriage, but for love of being alive and wanting to give.”

“It is darkness that makes us reach into the depths of our soul beyond where we have been before, in order to create a new reality. It is always darkest before the dawn.”

“Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.”

"'There can never be a true measure of my love for England - because I am a woman & I feel passionately that I would like to pilot a plane - or risk everything for something which I believe in so entirely & love so very deeply.'
Instead, she wrote, 'I lick down envelopes & work in an office & live a comfortable - happy life.'"

"I wanted to lose my virginity with the only person who had given me, thanks to his enormous authority as a male, a new beauty."

"Certainly I wouldn't have been capable of such ruthless lucidity, at the most critical moments I know how to hide from myself. But she didn't close her eyes, she didn't stop up her ears, she outlined her situation with precision."

"Oh, if I really could get lost, I thought at one point, leave myself somewhere, like an umbrella, and never have anything more to do with me."

"He's a normal person, I thought, or maybe one of his many good qualities is that he knows how to be normal."

"neither Vittoria nor my father nor I could cut out our common roots, and so, depending on the situation, it was always ourselves we ended up loving or hating."

"I behaved like that certainly to feel free from all the old bonds, to make it clear that I didn't care anymore about the judgment of relatives and friends, their values, their wanting me to be consistent with what they imagined themselves to be."

"As for my face, it had no harmony, just like Vittoria's. But the mistake had been to make it a tragedy. If you looked even just for a moment at those who had the privilege of a beautiful, refined face, you discovered that it hid infernos no different from those expressed by coarse, ugly faces. The splendor of a face, enhanced even by kindness, harbored and promised suffering still more than a dull face."

"But there's a black veil that can drop at any moment. It's a sudden blindness, you don't know how to keep your distance, you crash into things. Does it happen only to some people or to everybody that, once a certain level is passed, they can't see straight anymore? And was it truer when you saw everything clearly or when the strongest and deepest feelings - hatred, love - blinded you?"

"You told her that men are always wrong and should assume their responsibilities, but you have never done that with Mamma, or with me. You're a liar, Papa, a liar who frightens me just because of that good will you can draw out when you want to."

"how rough men were, how brutal in every word they dedicated to love. They liked humiliating us, dragging us along their lewd path."

"I waned a love like that, too, but not a man who didn't deserve it."