Sara > Recent Status Updates

“We never bow to the authority of him who has no great name to sanction his absurdities.”

“A plain unvarnished tale is preferable to the most highly ornamented narrative. Where we see that a man has the power, we may naturally suspect that he has the will to deceive us; and those who are used to literary manufacture know how much is often sacrificed to the rounding of a period, or the pointing of an antithesis.”

"I am not very disciplined, however, and have mainly made peace with that, so reopened the laptop."

"What was wrong with me? I wished at this point I cared about myself enough to try to answer the question."

"I wished that well-meaning white liberals would think before they said things that they thought were perfectly innocent."

"'I'm not calling you racist, I'm saying that if the thinking is that someone should be killed for doing something wrong, that thinking is dangerous,"

"Fuck retains its aura because it is both imperishably erotic and a fighting word. Its magic capacity for oscillation between these signifying powers, as in my mother's language realm and in the books on her shelves, describes its unusual value."

"The phrase 'I am angry' implies that we are that emotion, rather than merely having a momentary feeling. For some people, the only time they feel they are anything is when they are feeling some kind of intense emotion."

“I don’t really want to have spent the whole time sleeping with boys in cars and meeting crap men who do a good job of occupying my brain space but will ultimately diminish my self-worth.”

“I made eye contact with a girl across the room who also appeared to be on a first date. We smiled at each other in solidarity.”

“‘I know, but it was a different time back then,’ I dared to sigh.
‘Yuh tink suffering discriminate against time?’”

"Every police procedural on television and film glamorizes these interrogations and implicitly approves of what are undeniable human abuses and violations of the Constitution. ... This makes for good and satisfying entertainment but represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the rights of suspects in a free society."

"People who look upon selfishness as a sin do not see that it is in the nature of things."

"If he owes some of his time to society, he does not owe his health to it, and it is folly to put himself in the place of his unfortunate friends. What is the result? Sorrow. Life is too short to cut it still shorter."

"and I thought that an anger that prevents you from enjoying a good you have desired is pure folly."

"Man is proud; he likes to triumph; but he deceives himself when he takes for love the desire to subject a woman who dares to resist him."

"Habit kills desire, and, once this desire is lost, what pleasure remains to a man in the society of the most perfect of women?"

".... Terminiello's words no doubt caused pain. But pain is better than the ineffable, unsustainable fantasy of the anesthetized opium dream.
Our pain, in the end, is what provokes us to seek healing."

"More dangerous, putting it in a museum consigns it safely to the past. It's as if to say that ll this over and done with, a relic of a barbarism that no longer exists. It's to assert that we're better than that, when evidence to the contrary is everywhere around us, bubbling up from beneath, just barely paved over.
Yes, the image still causes pain. Today's alt-right hatemongers cause pain...."

"The moment you become indifferent, their affection blooms again or their remorse vanishes; it would seem that their wounded self-esteem is the strongest passion that can occupy them; it will cause them to act with greater folly or to make more advances than love itself can inspire them to."

"they were always making further sacrifices of their wisdom to love."

"This woman, who had a tender heart, had turned it to God, not finding any human creature worthy of possessing it, and it was for this heart that I sought to vie with Divinity."

"for the people must break the idol they have worshipped."

".... they would end by knowing their own strength, and you can guess the insubordination that would be the result, an insubordination which is, in truth, easy to reduce by the shedding of a little blood, but which should always be prevented."

"The French always expect a reduction of the taxes from their heir to the throne; but the are mistaken. It is a prudent thing that they should be sufficiently burdened; it would indeed be very bad policy not to keep them always extremely busy in earning their livelihood; too much ease and leisure would give them time to think and reason...."

"Fortunately, she recovered consciousness little by little; and this was just as well, for I was beginning to find it burdensome to be too much loved."

"We must work to create a society with liberty and justice for all. We will fail and fail and fail at this goal. Our failure is the history of the world. But our humanity is in the fact that we never cease to try."

"When it comes to flags, the most persuasive act of free thinking that I encountered during the debate between Vietnamese students came from one young Vietnamese American man. Perhaps, he said, we should fly both flags. And if we cannot agree to do that, we should not fly any flag at all."

"....We turn to writers, here and in general, to help us understand and, even more, grasp both ends of ambiguities, to expand the scope of our vision to encompass the whole gray spectrum of human existence, in all its messy human detail."

"not just because writers are and have long been among the principal beneficiaries and guardians of the First Amendment but also because they traffic, by temperament and trade, in nuance and its elucidation, in ambiguity and shades of gray.....