Sara > Recent Status Updates

“Everyone barricaded against the suffering of others, hoarding their investment in their privatized versions of reality, giving their indifference the spin they needed in order to live exonerated, their therapist-office noise machines drowning out the cuckoo’s crying. What was the bird saying with it’s penetrating cries?”

“Izzy relishes have elephants in the room. It’s her preferred domestic pet, the sisters like teasing her.”

"Instead, it looks like she's going to have to learn to live with the disappointment of not being as grand as she would like to be."

"The default for most of the world is not happiness. Why then do we feel aggrieved when suffering strikes us?"

"The beautiful Maritza, a modern-day Helen of Troy. If so, Maritza, too, has gotten older and broader. The time after the happily ever after of fairy tales. They all live there now."

"But even the beauties of language, of words rightly chosen, are riddled with who we are, class and race, and whatever else will keep us - so we think - safe on the narrow path."

"The entrails of the the health care system, a phrase she has come to associate with the whole dysfunctional federal government, a stinky coil of stomach, small intestine, bowel (the three branches), none of them working properly."

"The description left Antonia feeling sad. The great loves they had all dreamed about as young women, reduced to the dubious compliment of horrors averted: at least I didn't marry an ax murderer, at least he's not a criminal, at least he didn't kill his father and marry his mother. That way lies literature."

“When we can’t fix something, it’s even more important to offer compassion.”

“turning on the news - in her case the radio - for company, her own sadness put in perspective by the larger sadness of the world.”

They do not need to be famous, important, visible; there is an aggression to fame, a violence to it, whereas anonymity is companionable; we’re all in this together; first, I bring my girlfriend, then I help you bring yours.”

“But then, that’s always been Tilly’s role. She is the doer - whether true or not anymore, by now their roles have self-perpetuating lives of their own.”

"All of us are as Randy put it best, 'a blink between here and never'."

"She talks to him in her head. You always liked being the one to know. But the afterlife has changed him. He no longer seems interested in having the last word."

"Her mind is full of quotations, the slate never wiped clean, always the feeling that she is plagiarizing someone else's wisdom."

"You'd think you were born with money in your family, she liked to tease him.
I never had it to begin with, so I'm not afraid to spend it, Sam responded."

"For those who want only the coming together, Thanatos becomes extreme in his insistence. For those who honor the separation, the distancing, the misunderstanding, and estrangements as part of the flow and growth of relationships, the dance of Eros can be eternally renewed."

"Being a police officer is depressing, because you're always too late. Here, after the time I spend with these kids, most of them straighten up."

"He had placed material profit and human life on the same scale. Was that the definition of a sociopath? If the oil industry were a man, would we call him a sociopath? If our governments, which systematically took Indigenous lives, were men, would we call them sociopaths? Was a sociopath just the man himself or also the society that enabled him?"

"This was the paradox of trauma: To heal from it, you had to know where it came from and then, in a sense, disbelieve it. You had to trust you were more than the damage done to you. No matter how much others made you suffer, you had to cease seeing yourself as a victim."

"that she could not bear the possibility that her children be tortured by tortured people. That she had wanted only to save them from the violence that went on and on and on."

.....I think that's why people come to her now, because she knows - that, at some point, nobody is going to be there. Nobody. Nobody will be there. You're going to be all by yourself."

"You know, when I look at what she's been through, she had nobody to stand there, to pull her aside, to walk with her, to guide her. She had to find that within herself. And I prayed. I love her. I really do. You don't even know how deep that love is. But when she was in that dark place, I couldn't reach over and help her. ...

“Do you think a person used to that entitlement would still be looking for a body five years later? I don’t have to have those pats on the back to go where I go. I don’t need that from anybody.”

“After the massacres, the boarding schools, the outright stealing of land, what lasted was the violence that got under a person’s skin, inside a person’s head. Shame became violence toward oneself and then violence toward one’s own community.”

“We had a lot going for us, because we had God going for us, but we didn’t have the money, and in this world, you have to have the money.”

"As long as we're members of society, it is unrealistic to expect that our personal happiness should always be given top priority."

"Yeah, I know everyone has a past. I have a past. I'm a felon. But I don't keep reliving my past. There's some people who rehabilitate to change their lives, and there are others who rehabilitate on paper to get to the next move, and that's the guy you're dealing with."

"Yeah, I know everyone has a past. I have a past. I'm a felon. But I don't keep reliving my past. There's some people who rehabilitate to change their lives, and there are others who rehabilitate on paper to get to the next move, and that's the guy you're dealing with."

"It must be added, however, that balance is not static. It is a constantly fluctuating homeostasis, a dynamic flexibility of give-and-take that balances over time in many different way."