Sara > Recent Status Updates

“And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped about my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy. “

“They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn’t do that in the town.”

“They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people and what they did.”

“I was surprised to hear her talk that way, like it was any ordinary thing you could just talk about like the weather or the new houses on the hills.”

“The best sort of creativity was the messy kind.”

You’d never think in a few more years someone almost left his house over that piece of clay and hit his wife in the jaw and scared his son. But besides me, that was the only thing Papa did while he was living that you could see now.”

“I knew that when a few more years came and they were tall, the whole little place would look just like any other place in the hills and you’d never know anyone spent almost all of one week’s pay on it and put in a lot of time too.

“its perfectly clear that we’re affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.”

“‘We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should’”

“That seemed like a beautiful prayer, so I looked out the window and began, and my eye fell on the neon Bible below and I couldn’t go on. Then I saw the stars in the heaven shining like the beautiful prayer, and I began again, and the prayer came out without even thinking, and I offered it up to the stars and the night sky.”

“I wondered why a woman had such a straight body, because Mother and Aunt Mae were round, and you could lay against them and be comfortable.”

“Our children always grow to live in a foreign country, removed not necessarily by ships across the sea but by era and disposition.”

“We are all mortal, of course. But how we depart: it makes a difference to those who remain.”

“Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.”

“During those last weeks of the Bishop’s life he though my very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself.”

“‘I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die from having lived.’”

“To fulfill the dreams of one’s youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.”

“Father Latour judged that, just as it was the white man’s way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a little (at least to leave some mark of memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian’s way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through water, or birds through the air.”

“Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.”

“Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world’s hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman’s tenderness. Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.”

“the cross that took away the indignity from suffering and made pain and poverty a means of fellowship with Christ.”

“One called the young Indians ‘boys,’ perhaps because there was something youthful and elastic in their bodies. Certain about their behavior there was nothing boyish in the American sense, not even in the European sense. Jacinto was never, by any chance, naïf; he was never taken by surprise.

“There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him.”

“The two men were about the same age, boy a little over forty, and both had been sobered and sharpened by wide experience.”

“But when one thinks of it, a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.”

“The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless - or rather, that it was crowded with features all exactly alike.”

“PETE. No. I think there’s a lot of love in you, Juanita. If you’ll let me help you, we can give it to the world. You can’t give it to the world until you find a person who can help you – love the world.
JUANITA. I’ve discovered that. The world is a loveless place.

“But now I know that there are more things in me than I’ll ever understand – and if I can’t be faithful to myself, I’m afraid to promise I’ll be faithful to one man!“

“Motherhood rarely allows for solitude, yet it begins its own kind of isolation: from one’s past, from one’s youth, from the women we once thought we were and would become.”

“terrified of all the loss that lay ahead - the people who would leave me behind, and how as we age we leave ourselves behind, too, and wake up as somebody we don’t always recognize.”