Sara > Recent Status Updates

“‘Why do you pretend that what we do is nothing?’ She asked. ‘Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.’”

“‘It’s hard to predict, isn’t it?’, she asked, looking blankly in front of her as she moved a black bishop across the board to take a white pawn. ‘The things that will make us happy.’”

“She had shrunk for him, but he still hadn’t found the space he needed. No more.”

“There’s another universe where you send me Whatsapp messages about how messed up you are without me. How you turn to alcohol, although it seems like you turn to alcohol with me too.”

“When she thought about it - and increasingly she had been thinking about it - Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn’t. The things she hadn’t been able to come.”

“But Mrs. Elm shook her head. ‘That isn’t how death works.’
‘Why not?’
‘You don’t go to death. Death comes to you.’”

“Happy moments can turn into pain given time.”

“‘Bands don’t last. We’d have been a meteor shower. Over before we started.’
‘Meteor showers are fucking beautiful.’”

“The universe tended toward chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.”

“No, Jo. Not you. Withering’s not in your nature.”

“He didn’t seem to understand that turning your back on the darkness didn’t mean the darkness would turn its back on you.”

“She realized she would have to choose between Eddie and her family. And that choosing one would mean losing the other, and either way, she’d break her own heart.”

“Eleanor had made her choices - or tried to. She’d chosen a man. She’s chosen to sleep with him before they were married. She’d chosen to keep their child. She’d broken the rules and she’d paid for it - with her life.”

“‘What can I say? I merely wish to smoke. Sparky can forgive that. You, on the other hand, wish to know things. And no one can forgive a girl for that.’”

“That was a weird bed thing, too, and Kane kept out of it. These stories surrounded him but we’re not his to explore. You didn’t have to feed every single bird, as Ursula said. Sometimes it was better to trust people to figure it out for themselves and to be there just in case they didn’t.”

“Kane was small within the chaos. A simple pinprick of glittering defiance, all the way at the top of a busy, senseless oblivion.”

“‘That’s the thing about a big imagination. It’s hard to belong anywhere when you can always imagine something better. I wouldn’t worry about settling just yet, though. You’re very young. Lots of time to figure out what you want, and then make it happen.”

“They all taught him something new about the way dreams inhabit a person. Dreams can be parasites we sacrifice ourselves to. Dreams can be monstrous, beautiful things incubated in misery and hatched by spite. Or dreams can be the artifacts we excavate to discover who we really are.”

“Sometimes a person’s dreams are all they have and taking them away can break a heart or even stop a body. The act of crushing a dream can’t be minimized. At best, it’s mean. At worst, it’s murder.”

“After the past few weeks of magic and the supernatural, reality felt insufferably unengaging.”

“Their beauty made him feel worse. He reminded himself that autumn, for all its cozy brilliance, was actually a flamboyant sequence of decay.”

“He though of secret meetings and secret names, and the secret sadness that grew like mold in the humidity of a life kept closed.”

“‘You speak of the real world as though it is salvation, but don’t you see? People like us .... something separates us from the real world. Something makes sure we never belong.’”

“The old words stirred in Kane, all the acid he’d saved up for Elliot and the Others, but those emotions were flat now, like old soda. He didn’t know what to say to move the conversation past it, though. Thankfully, Elliot offered a path forward.”

“‘Just because something is imagined doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. Sometimes the things we believe in are the most dangerous things about us. That’s why people build entire worlds in their minds. Because they think they’re safe, but they’re wrong. Dreams are like parasites. They grow up in the dark within us, and they grow deadly.”

“‘If you look at most female archetypes - the mother, the virgin, the whore - their power comes from their relation to men. But not the Witch. The Witch derives her power from nature. She calls forth her dreams with spells and incantations. With poetry. And I think that’s why we are frightened of them. What’s scarier to the world of men than a woman limited only by her imagination?’”

“He had been acting pretty terrible since the accident. Avoidant. Gloomy. Brittle. But these were the things Kane had always been. It was just that now people were looking to him for explanations. They wanted answers, or at least to see a brave survivor of something terrible.”

“Then I rubbed my eyes slowly, pressing my fingertips into my eye sockets. The world went pleasantly blurry, and I didn’t have to see the details anymore.”

“Some of us like the dark. It’s what we know.”

“I had the same feeling Of Civ nearby, looking over my shoulder, like I’d had in apartment C. I was so close, with just the thing shimmer of time between me and her.”