Sara > Recent Status Updates

"I told them that listening to their stories, and through living some of my own, I had a feeling that we were living a series of fairy tales in which all the good fairies had gone on strike, leaving us stranded in the middle of a forest not far from the wicked witch's candy house.'

“Walter’s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous.”

“A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed.”

“I don’t know, it’s a lot of pain. I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.”

“But simply punishing the broken - walking away from them or hiding them from sight - only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.”

“We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our own best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.”

“But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtured and sustains our capacity for compassion.”

“Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right?”

....When the news spread that the drugs were being used in executions in the United States, European producers stopped making them available. The drugs became scarce, which prompted state correctional authorities to obtain them illegally, without complying with FDA rules that regulate the interstate sale and transfer of drugs."

"questions about the drug combination that most states used to carry out lethal injections arose. Many states were using drugs that had been banned for animal euthanasia because they caused a painful and torturous death. The drugs weren't readily available in the United States, and so states had started importing them from European manufacturers. ....

"It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole."

"They had never learned any better. From the first day they had set foot in elementary school, they had been told to memorize. They had been told that their own opinions counted for nothing."

"I knew and they knew that the word adulterous, like all other words confiscated by the regime, had lost its meaning. It was merely an insult, intended to make you feel dirty and disqualified. I also knew that this could happen anywhere: the world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors."

....now that all this was illegal, I felt light and fictional, as if I were walking on air, as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe."

"I had not realized how far the routines of one's life create the illusion of stability. Now that I could not call myself a teacher, a writer, now that I could not wear what I would normally wear, walk in the streets to the beat of my own body, shout if I wanted to or to pat a male colleague on the back on the spur of the moment, ....

"Despite America's preeminent status among developed nations, we have always struggled with high rates of infant mortality - much higher than in most developed countries. The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and postpartum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades."

“We’ve all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”

“Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity, the way that raping or abusing someone would. I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.”

“One of the country’s least-discusses postwar problems is how frequently combat veterans bring the traumas of war back with them and are incarcerated after returning to their communities.”

“I was around all these murderers, and yet it felt like sometimes they were the only ones trying to help me.”

“An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others.”

“Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, or commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality can not be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”

“I have discovered, deep in the hearts of many condemned and incarcerated people, the scattered traces of hope and humanity - seeds of restoration that come to astonishing life when nurtured by very simple interventions.”

“‘You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,’”

“‘Bryan,’ he said at some point during our short flight, ‘capital punishment means them without the capital get the punishment.’”

“I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.”

“Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough, to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection.”

“and in that story you keep turning the pages. That’s hope. We hope with words, and we hope with deeds and in so doing manifest the things that we need, the things that fulfill us”

“You have to be who you were to become who you are”

“Love is not a respecter of borders.”