Lucía > Recent Status Updates

grief did not dim with time; it was instead a volatile state of being.

privilege is always relative to something else.

She was bitter because she thought if everything was the same, except for her race, she would have been made vice president. And she talked about it a lot until she died. But somehow my mom’s experience is suddenly unnuanced. ‘Nuance’ means keep people comfortable so everyone is free to think of themselves as individuals and everyone got where they are because of their achievement.

race is a brew best served mild, tempered with other liquids, otherwise white folk can’t swallow it.

If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place.

They wore their love like a heavy perfume, exuding a transparent commitment, touching each other, referring to each other.

Shan had the air of a person who was somehow chosen. The gods had placed a wand on her. If she did ordinary things, they became enigmatic.

Words are not swords.

“Every battle is a gamble, Snow. The man who does nothing also takes a risk.”

When Shan walked into a room, all the air disappeared. She did not have to breathe deeply; she did not need to: the air simply floated towards her, drawn by her natural authority, until there was nothing left for others.

“We should have done things more improbably,” she said.

It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go? Perhaps real love was familial, somehow linked to blood, since love for children did not die as romantic love did.

Se enseña con el ejemplo, la doctrina tiene que estar encarnada, tiene que existir alguien que resulte atractivo porque reuna en una misma persona su ser humano y su ser más que humano.

No se trata de fingir que filosofamos —dice Epicuro— sino de filosofar realmente, porque sucede aquí como en el caso de la salud: no se trata de aparentar que estamos sanos, sino de estarlo realmente. No es sabio el que puede mantener discursos filosóficos sino el que sabe vivir.

(...) conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burdened villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.

all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, (...)

The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx of black and brown people from countries created by Britain.

There were people who were born with an inability to be tangled up in dark emotions, in complications

He always spoke quickly, pugnaciously, as though every conversation was an argument, the speed and force of his words suggesting authority and discouraging dissent.

It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care?

that tone of theirs, the tone of people who knew how much they were needed.

She sensed that he did not always believe her, or that his belief lasted only so long before he would need to hear her affirmation again. There was something in him, lighter than ego but darker than insecurity, that needed constant buffing, polishing, waxing.

sunny and wealthy people who existed on the glimmering surface of things

“El hombre bien nacido se dedica principalmente a la sabiduría y a la amistad. De éstas, una es un bien mortal; la otra, inmortal.”
Epicuro

…so happy, a true believer. He believed in good omens and positive thoughts and happy endings to films, a trouble-free belief, because he had not considered them deeply before choosing to believe; he just simply believed.

He was upbeat, relentlessly so, in a way that only an American of his kind could be, and there was an infantile quality to this that she found admirable and repulsive.

Ifemelu sometimes sensed, underneath the well-oiled sequences of Kimberly’s life, a flash of regret not only for things she longed for in the present but for things she had longed for in the past.

…this girl who somehow believed that she was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally.

Why dispeople ask “What is it about?” as if a novel had to be about only one thing.

She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.