Sara > Recent Status Updates

"The California and Michigan flagship institutions have found that without taking race in consideration, it is very difficult to achieve representative levels of diversity across the higher education landscape, despite the demographic changes of the twenty-first century."

"Neighbors connect each other (or each other's children) to employment opportunities and other needed resources. Keeping groups separated means that community helpfulness is not shared across racial lines. Because of residential segregation, economic disadvantage and racial disadvantage are inextricably linked."

"What sort of early interventions might have helped them before the medications took their toll, neutralizing them without curing them? And what about the thousands of people who couldn't afford what her son had - who languish because of a lack of resources, or a stigma from a society that would prefer to pretend that people like them do not exist?"

"Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us.
We are human because the people around us make us human."

"From her family, Lindsay could see how we all have an amazing ability to shape our own reality, regardless of the facts. We can live our entire lives in a bubble and be quite comfortable. And there can be other realities that we refuse to acknowledge, but are every bit as real as our own."

"'I think the company's pharmacologists were smart enough to know all this.' Freedman said, 'but their marketing people rule how they make drugs. And so, they sort of were doomed to failure.'"

"'What's fire, Dad?' he asked.
I thought for a minute, searching for truth in simplicity. 'Trees make wood by gluing parts of air and water together with sunshine. When the wood burns, the sunshine comes back out in fire and the water and air go up in smoke.'"

"Cody displayed a child's innate fascination with life - biophilia, a relic from teh past when children's interest in their environment made the difference between life and death. Some of us never outgrow it."

"that ski tour remains one of the few experiences of my life that surpassed all my expectations: simultaneously far more intimidating and alluring than I could have ever imagined. If was my first mountain wilderness expedition. I wanted more challenges like that to both dwarf and empower me."

“Those who rejected the pharmaceutical therapies argued, just as R. D. Laing and others in the anti-psychiatry movement had in the 1960s, that not every society anesthetizes its unconventional thinkers.”

"What a fate, I thought that day, for the New York analyst condemned to years of listening to analysands like myself, insight manufacturers one and all, who are forever seeing something or other for the first time and, none of us, able to act on what we see."

"But unnuanced freedom is no freedom at all. It's the nuance that makes us act like civilized human beings, even when we do not feel like civilized human beings. Do away with nuance and it's all animal life; in other words, war."

"Responsible for every successful connection ever made between a book and a reader - no less than between people - is that deepets of all human mysteries, emotional readiness: upon which the shape of every life is vitally dependent."

"neither love not the promise of wealth or fame or even good health - would ever match the feeling of being alive to myself - real to myself - that writing gave me."

"The strongest reason that she, Stanton, knew for giving women every means of enlarging their sphere of action is the ultimate solitariness of every life."

"This novella captures neatly the surreal quality of outsiders living inside a compensatory bubble of their own making, sealed in by the silence of the indifferent outer world."

"Max through whom the primitive fear of consciousness itself comes most alive; the fear rooted in the suspicion that should we get to the heart of things we will find: nothing."

"The acclimatization to deadened feeling - in war or in peace - is her great subject. For her, this is the enemy of life, the criminal charge she brings against the human condition: that which allows us to adapt ourselves to the atrophied heart."

“Feelings were scary in the Galvin family, Silvern said. There has been too many out-of-control horrors for it to be otherwise.”

"Set in London in the fall of 1942, it [The Heat of the Day] is preoccupied with the unknown within ourselves breaking through during time of devastation, reveling the fatal lack of fellow feeling beneath the civilized surface we assume as a second skin."

"she had created stories and novels meant to acquaint the reader with the power of the one thing - the extreme psychological state - that she deeply understood: namely, that fear of feeling makes us inflict on one another the little murders of the soul that anesthetize the spirit and shrivel the heart; stifle desire and humiliate sentiment; make war electrifying and peace dreary."

"it's as though I was born to manufacture my own grievance. But why? And hold on to it for dear life. Again, why?"

“She thinks about the emotional slavery that accompanies desire: the longings, the anxieties, the potential for humiliation. Still, the lure is powerful. The war within provides the excitement of transgression.”

“Not only does sexual ecstasy not deliver us to ourselves, one must have a self already in place to know what to do with it, should it come.”

“And it was true: to feel badly but calmly about what is spiritually deforming is the mediocre norm; to rage against it is to become an instrument of revolutionary change.”

“I now think that Lawrence saw this last time Sons and Lovers was published - he was then twenty-seven - but the insight alone could not stack up against the pressure of that other thing that he also saw, and that was to be his life’s obsession: that to be deprived of experience of the senses, as bourgeois society demanded we be, was truly a sin against life.”

"that love would not only be pursued, it would be achieved; and once achieved transform existence; create a rich, deep, textured prose out to one another. The promise of love alone gave us the courage to dream of leaving these caution-ridden precincts in order to turn our faces outward toward genuine experience."

“Great literature, I though then and think now, is a record not of the achievement of wholeness of being but of the ingrained effort made on its behalf.”

“On the one hand, I was thrilled by the woman’s outburst; on the other, the loss of civility among us left me with the taste of ashes in my mouth. Who could have imagined that so much hate and fear had been festering for so long inside so many of us.”

“Everywhere I looked I saw sexism: raw and brutal, ordinary and intimate, ancient and ever present.”