Sara’s Reviews > Afterlife > Status Update

"All the things she is breaking in her plunge are being reassembled, a painter's brush correcting her errors, the lines of repair showing up as lines in poems and stories she has loved, evidence of the damage done."

“Everyone barricaded against the suffering of others, hoarding their investment in their privatized versions of reality, giving their indifference the spin they needed in order to live exonerated, their therapist-office noise machines drowning out the cuckoo’s crying. What was the bird saying with it’s penetrating cries?”

“Izzy relishes have elephants in the room. It’s her preferred domestic pet, the sisters like teasing her.”

"Instead, it looks like she's going to have to learn to live with the disappointment of not being as grand as she would like to be."

"The default for most of the world is not happiness. Why then do we feel aggrieved when suffering strikes us?"

"The beautiful Maritza, a modern-day Helen of Troy. If so, Maritza, too, has gotten older and broader. The time after the happily ever after of fairy tales. They all live there now."

"But even the beauties of language, of words rightly chosen, are riddled with who we are, class and race, and whatever else will keep us - so we think - safe on the narrow path."

"The entrails of the the health care system, a phrase she has come to associate with the whole dysfunctional federal government, a stinky coil of stomach, small intestine, bowel (the three branches), none of them working properly."

"The description left Antonia feeling sad. The great loves they had all dreamed about as young women, reduced to the dubious compliment of horrors averted: at least I didn't marry an ax murderer, at least he's not a criminal, at least he didn't kill his father and marry his mother. That way lies literature."

“turning on the news - in her case the radio - for company, her own sadness put in perspective by the larger sadness of the world.”