Sara > Recent Status Updates

“Would she really be ruined for all future relationships? She used to believe this without question. Now it seemed like propaganda - powerful propaganda it was, too, given how it still rattled around in her brain even as she rejected it.”

“Here’s what we wonder: How does a man like Brad become a man like Brad - that is, so assured of his authority and viewpoint that he never bothers to interrogate himself.”

“Valerie understood that while her son did and always would hold her heart is his hands, the fact of being a parent was that her son’s heart was and must be reserved for someone else.”

“Valerie remembered being that age, her total lack of confidence in adults at the time. Adults caused the problems, they didn’t solve them. And wasn’t that still generally true? Yes, it was.”

“What was the point of all the progress toward equal rights if a guy like him - i.e., not white - has to keep agitating rather than live in the results?”

“‘None of them believe in regulations. They don’t care what the effects of breaking them might be. Rules are for losers and cowards and poor people.”

“Julia seemed to be merely an unwitting accomplice to (or we might even say a cooperative victims of) her husband’s ambitions and desires.”

“Julia loves how even something as personal as the experience of reading a novel could be made into a community activity.”

“‘Prejudice is ugly. I don’t like to think I’m capable of it.’
‘I hate to break it to you, but you’re human.’”

“A neighborhood that had come to think of itself as progressive yet was not doing much to demonstrate that character.”

“Of all the genres, classical was the one that made him feel beauty, and he needed that feeling to help him get through all the emotional noise in his world.”

“‘We need to keep at least seven trees for every human on the planet, or else people are going to start suffocating. Think of that.’”

“Though it seems absurd to expect two women to love each other just because they were groped by the same man. There must be a point where you’re allowed to be defined by something other than what he did to you.”

“So when my mother asks me to forgive her, I say ‘Of course I do.’ I don’t tell her again she couldn’t have stopped it, that it wasn’t her fault and that she doesn’t deserve it. I swallow those words instead. Maybe somewhere deep in my belly, they’ll take root and grow.”

“This, I realize, is where it was always going to end up. I gave him permission to do the unspeakable things he always craved, offered up my body as the site of the crimes, and he indulged for a while, but in his heart, he’s not a villain. He’s a man who wants to be good, and I know as well as anyone that the easiest way to do that is to cut out the thing that makes you bad.”

"I'm not a victim because I've never wanted to be, and if I don't want to be, then I'm not. That's how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind."

"but she knows that it's the truth that has spooked me, the expanse of it, the starkness. It offers nowhere to hide."

"How easy it is to be tricked into building a narrative out of air, out of nothing."

“I knew it was too much to feel, let alone show, yet I couldn’t stop it from letting loose one Saturday afternoon”

"me who claim to be turned on by strength but can only handle women who act like girls."

"I get the feeling all he really wants is to leave part of himself inside me, to stake his claim, not to impregnate me or anything like that, but something more permanent. He wants to make sure he'll always be there, no matter what. He wants to leave his fingerprints all over me, every piece of muscle and bone."

"Like girls sitting in the bleachers at basketball games watching the boys play, or girls sitting on the couch watching boys play video games. Endless waiting.
It's funny to think how wrong Mom was about all that. Because there's another option for those brave enough to take it: bypass boys altogether, go straight to men. Men who will never make you wait; men who are starved and grateful for scraps of attention"

“How easily their ordinary lives go on, running parallel to my own.”

“I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me - breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.”

“He says that by believing our lives have endless possibilities, we stave off the horrifying truth that to live is merely to move forward through time while an internal clock counts down to a final, fatal moment.”

"'If there's one thing you take away from this class, it should be that the world is made of endlessly intersecting stories, each one valid and true.'"

"That seems like the likely ending to this love story: me dropping everything and doing anything, devoted as a dog, as he takes and takes and takes."

"the Constitution is just another lofty infrastructure in need of rehabilitation."

"When that day of jubilee finally arrives, all of us will be there with you, walking, heads held high, crowns a-glitter, because we do have a right to be here."

"I want to look happily forward. I want to be optimistic. I want to have a dream. I want to live in jubilee. I want my daughters to feel that they have the power to at least try to change things, even in a world that resists change with more strength than they have."