Sara > Recent Status Updates

“no matter where society situates the cemetery, there is no them and us. We’re just as vulnerable.”

“Our epidemics, the commonality of our despair, our continual mistakes, the prepares we have yet to make, the wrong we have yet to correct - all these are mirrored back to us by the dead. No on likes to be reminded of these things, but they don’t go away just because the bodies do.”

“The dead tell us how we’re dying, how we’re living, who among us gets a better shot than others at a whole and healthy life, and how we remain vulnerable to one another and to the vicissitudes of an unpredictable world.”

“‘It’s hard for human nature. You always want to rationalize why somebody would do something. But sometimes you can’t.’”

"'There is a privilege that we have not earned but that we have,' Sharlee said. "No one is going to billy-club us, not one is going to hit us or gas us. We're Mormon women! We'll bring cookies!' She smiled. 'So we have to claim that privilege and use it for the good of our vulnerable brothers and sisters. It is our responsibility to do that.'"

“how I wound up having lunch with a group of lovely Mormon women who bake brownies and see their children’s Halloween costumes and would like nothing more than to politely overthrow the government.”

“And the bald desire to fit into jingoistic idea of Americanness that contorts the people it touches”

“I hesitate to draw parallels between my life and my mother’s because they are not the same life - by her design. My mother raised me with the hope that she could be my threshold, that her sacrifices and mistakes, her proximity to oppression, would deliver me to a different life, a life of being inside, where there was no space I wouldn’t occupy comfortably, wherein the whole beautiful world was for me.”

“This is the basis for all human fascinations, and all reality television: desire and repulsion.”

"It is an inside joke of history that its most exciting adventures inevitably end their careers as homework."

"Picture, if you will, the heartbreakingly temporary canvas of a summer night. Each moment evaporates into the mist of memory as fast as it can be felt. The muggy scent of summer's stillness is pierced only by the trivial phosphorescence of a mindless firefly. Dead stars linger on in the sky as a sick joke - absence itself masquerading as a panoply of permanence."

"Endless war over minor ideological differences remains one of the most defining aspects of human life well into the 21st century (see Regular News)."

"You've seen the figure in the story before, making her way across the desert, driven by motivations that echo. The figure is now you, you are now her, moving through not so much a real place as a corner of the collective unconscious. It's all pleasantly and unnervingly surreal, or hyperreal, like living a story that's already been written."

"I was following the grand American tradition of running westward from my problems."

"Saying I can't get enough space is just another way of saying that I'm not thinking very well and that this problem of thinking feels at least partially spatial."

"There's a membrane between imagining God's love as a thought experiment and experience it as an absolute reality, and if you slip across it, the entire known universe shatters and reassembles itself to be more whole and beautiful than you thought was possible. I had forgotten."

"What people display, the partying, the craziness, is not the problem. It's a symptom. The problem is that they feel they aren't loved."

"These conversations were lonely, a series of loving but hopeless attempts to map a barrier we couldn't see and wouldn't overcome."

"Love always won in the end. No matter how it happened, no matter what it took, no matter what it meant. Fair or not, true or not, love won.
If it was a conspiracy, at least it was the best of its kind in the wold."

"Were we, in fact, really still friends - like we said we were, and thought we were, and which comforted us as we each staked out new lives in cities where we didn't really know anyone at all? Or, I wondered, were we just slowly transforming into simpler and more easily digestible fictional characters to one another - in other words, becoming our profile pictures"

"When you're young, you think everything you do is just the beginning. But when you're old, no matter who you are, you realize you only did one or two things."

"It didn't make any sense, thought Elvis; but somehow, the line that makes someone the same person from day to day must have snapped inside him when he wasn't paying attention, which had been, he admitted to himself with a shameful shudder, a lot of the time."

" why do you always post pics of ur food!?

He did it because it made him feel like he was eating his meals with more people.
It was the same reason he liked the teasing."

"Is it just that everything came too easy? Because if you're romanticizing 'difficult' . . . you're going to get over that quickly, I promise you. I promise you. Everyone forgets how difficult 'difficult' really is."

"The first is the type that seems so obvious and intuitive to you and everyone else that in a perfect world it would simply be considered standard; but, in reality, in our flawed world, what should be considered standard is actually so rare that it has to be elevated to the level of 'perfect'."

"I don't need to look at the head on my shoulder, and I never do, because what's so important to me is not what the person looks like, but that we are seeing the same thing."

"Do you know what it's like to sing a song that started inside you to a room full of laughing, dancing children, who keep singing it even after you stop?
It feels like the world is made of music, and you are the world."

“In thin places, the folklore goes, the barrier between the physical world and the spiritual world wears thin and becomes porous. Invisible things, like music or love or dead people or God, might become visible there, or if they don’t become visible they become so present and tangible that it doesn’t matter.”

“The ‘sacred’ places of the body are the ones where membranes are exposed: our mouths, eyes, our genitals, the places where we connect with others and make ourselves vulnerable to them.”

“The imminent danger was my misfiring sense of imminent danger, the revelation that the stability and habitability of the world can change as the mind changes. Minds are not reliable stable or habitable.”