Sara > Recent Status Updates

“And I realized that, as this is true of just about every book I consumed between the ages of, say, fifteen and forty, and I haven’t even read the books I think I’ve read. I can’t tell you how depressing this is. What’s the fucking point?”

“I shamed and begged him into picking up Great Expectations instead. But when I tried to recall anything about it other than it’s excellence, I failed.”

“That’s the sound of being alive. It’s your time, Nick. Your one chance to have fun before it’s all stolen by them, the adults, with their cruelty and endless rules, their can’t-do-this and can’t-do-that’s, their have-tos, and better-dos, their little boxes and cages all designed to break your spirit, to kill your magic.”

“He used to say that all crimes were only ‘varieties of theft’. Murder included. When you kill a man you steal his life.”

“It’s true that dad did not have a great extensive education but in school we only learn to recognize the words and to spell but the application of these words to real life is another thing that only life and living can give us.”

“A week after Weismann’s death, public executions were banned in France - not because they were too horrifying to watch, but because authorities knew that people will watch them no matter how horrifying they are.”

“A sensible question, as Mrs. Clare, an admirer of logic, though a curious interpreter of it, was driven to admit.”

...Once you start to answer that question, you realize that shrunken grads like these are a product as much of European curiosity, European taste and European purchasing power as they are of an archaic tribal custom.”

“‘How were they made? By slitting the skin, taking out the skull and brains and steaming them with hot sand? Gross!’ But what no one asks is: how did they get here? What are they doing hanging up in a university museum in the south of England?

“‘How were they made? By slitting the skin, taking out the skull and brains and steaming them with hot sand? Gross!’ But what no one asks is: how did they get here? What are they doing hanging up in a university museum in the south of England?....

“‘Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, but she always has time. And that’s one definition of a lady.’”

“The severed head is compelling - and horrific - because it denies one of the most basic dichotomies we use to understand our world: that people and objects are defined in opposition to each other.”

“Survival. That’s what TV should teach innocent children. How to live in a world that really doesn’t give a damn about anyone but their own - and sometimes, not even their own.”

“It was darkness lit up by the moon so full and bright, and the stars seemed to flash Morse Cose beams to one another .... fate accomplished .....”

“‘And when I fall in love,’ I began, ‘I will build a mountain to touch the sky. Then, my lover and I will have the best of both worlds, reality firmly under our feet, while we have our heads in the clouds with all our illusions still intact.’”

“And from every book I’d ever read, I took one wise bead of philosophy and strung them all into a rosary to believe in for the rest of my life.”

“‘Perspective makes all the difference in a painting.’
It made all the difference in everything, if you asked me.”

“We make evil when we label something so. Evil exists as a word, not as a subjective concept. But I firmly believe there is no person, no group, no behavior, no thing that is objectively evil. Perhaps evil only really exists in our fears.”

“I needed to remind myself that these thought experiments help us grow as human beings, that by understanding each other and ourselves we move forward as a society.”

“‘Evil acts are not necessarily the deeds of evil men, by may be attributable to the operation of powerful social forces.”

“Society teaches men that the make-up on our faces is for them. That the clothes we wear are for them. That our bodies are for them.”

“It was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me. When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes in a kind of urgency.”

“While personal belief in a just world can be good for us, as it is empowering and makes us feel in control of our own lives, the implications of general belief in a just-world beliefs have been linked with many negative attitudes, including towards the poor, and towards victims of crime, including rape.”

“We fear that which we do not know. Be brave. Only transparency can help elicit the cultural change that we need.”

“Someone being attractive certainly puts are creep-dar off kilter. We make all kinds of bad decisions around beautiful people. This is related to something called the halo effect, which happens when we assume to look good is to be good.”

“We love killing so much that our species is referred to as a ‘super predator’. This is because humans kills more in terms of quantity and diversity than any other predator.”

“It is easy to forget that the complexity of the human experience does not stop just because an individual has committed a crime. A single act should not define a person.”

“You will find that things that seem normal to you don’t seem to be normal to others, and might even be utterly reprehensible. Perhaps we are all evil. Or, perhaps none of us are.”