Sarahland Quotes

“Being a tree, affirmation would feel different. Love would feel different. We would be happiest if our soil was full of microbes chatting. We would be happiest if the soil was rich enough to contain a complex fungal network that would allow us to sort of blur into it and talk to or just sort of be each other.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“It was strange, Sari thought, that girls' joy in their own freedom was so often the thing that made men want to turn them into wives.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“It seemed like everyone was wrapping themselves in chrysali and having late-in-life emergences as different kinds of creatures, and what this made clear was that we weren't becoming anything. We felt like caterpillars who didn't know that being a caterpillar wasn't the endgame. We felt like foamy pond water.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“It wasn't that Sarah didn't want to be her own person, it was just that she couldn't figure out how other people became specific like they were. She wasn't sure if everyone did this, if everyone's shared secret was that they mimicked fictional characters, or if this was a personality disorder she hadn't learned about in her college psych classes.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“Sarah didn't use a holder but she smoked out the window after gazing at her own reflection in her laptop's Photo Booth app and masturbating to it. Smoking and masturbating were Sarah's two favorite things. In the studio apartment for which she paid her very own rent, far away from the girls with the microwave popcorn and ignoring all calls from her own parents, she was beginning to accept this.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“Sarah hated tutoring but also wasn't sure what to do with all her time that wasn't tutoring. She read a little and laid on her bed a lot. It's really easy, in a studio apartment, to end up lying on your bed a lot. No one told Sarah that if you're going to just abandon the story that is The Only Story, you have to replace it with something—you have to, like, fight for social justice or become a genius artist. Sarah felt loosely inclined toward art and social justice but she wasn't really doing anything about those loose inclinations.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“Sarah gazed at the story-girl in the mirror and immediately thought of that bananafish story from high school, the one about the ways materialism makes women selfish and therefore incapable of caring for their tortured bb boyfriends. This wasn't going to be that story—this was going to be a different story. Anyway, Sarah had no tortured bb boyfriend because she was, at the moment, riding the second wave and starting to believe in lesbianism as a moral imperative, and so it was fine if she was into herself and also materials.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“I tell Sasha about the boy I've now given two blow jobs to, only I don't phrase it like that, I say, hooked up with, and how I can barely find anything special about him to like, except that now he's not calling me I feel like I'm not special and want his attention. And I start thinking, well, he does have a really cute smile and he plays the guitar, which is cool, and he talks so little that he's probably secretly super smart.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“Fourteen transformed my thighs into Spanish hams that spread out wide and flat, sticking to bleachers and peeling off painfully in the summertime. My chest sprung overnight C cups. At fifteen, I reduced my calorie count to 400 daily. Four hundred seemed like enough for basic metabolic processes, yet few enough to strip the meat from my thighs and breasts, to make me less like a bucket of chicken and more like a super skinny girl. On 400 calories, I could wear crop halters and black leggings to musical practice. On 400 calories, my mom rewarded me with shopping trips. On 400 calories, I no longer went poo, which was nice because poo had always disgusted me and I no longer bled from my vag, which was also nice because I had been praying not to bleed from my vag ever since I read "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" and really really didn't identify with Margaret but did learn about certain kinds of negotiations you could make with God.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“Eating is the world's greatest shame. I just learned the word slut-shaming from a flyer posted to one of the student union bulletin boards, but as far as I can tell, you can swallow dick in any quantity and no one cares.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“I thought college would be exactly like summer camp, that there was a magic formula where you put a bunch of girls in an enclosed space without parents and we'd become Real. But, I deduced after major sleuthing, two factors were getting in the way: money and boys.

Neither existed at camp and here both were everywhere. The annual social we'd have with the nearby boys' camp was the worst day of the year: everyone unearthed makeup and flat-irons stowed under bunk beds for the other fifty-eight days of camp. Normally we spent our days and nights sailing and tie-dyeing towels and weaving macramé wall hangings and trying to get up on one water ski and singing along to Joni Mitchell and the Indigo Girls around a literal bonfire but suddenly on the day of the social we only cared about having the straightest hair and the clearest skin and someone was always being a cunt to her best friend and someone was always crying.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“I chose this college because of a barista during my campus visit, I think. The barista's head was shaved on one side and she had piercings all the way up her ear. She seemed angry in general but like she liked me and I thought I would come to know girls like her here. But since Sarah A. created the Excel schedule chart, I only ever went anywhere in a pack. If it was blizzarding excessively, Sarah A. demanded we take a cab. The cab would go on streets we didn't normally take. I'd see a group of kids with Kool-Aid hair and fingerless gloves standing around a coffee shop smoking, probably talking about deep things. I felt like they might know the locations of some of the keys to the levels I'd need to pass through in order to be a dolphin scientist. But I was destined, it seemed, only to ever get glimpses outside the Jew groove from a cab window.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“Going Out is something we have to do every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night. I'm not sure if any of us like it, but we show up for it like we show up for class, like we would show up for a job if we had one. I'm not sure how everyone found out about Going Out, how everyone discovered it will make these The Best Years of Our Lives but at eight p.m. on Thursdays, my roommate Shira starts automatically flat-ironing her hair and Sarah B. sends out a group text saying, "What are we doing tonight?" and Sarah A. says, "Meet in my room at 9.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“That's how it is with nations," we hear Mother Nature croak from her deathbed. "Nations war.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“It wasn't a big deal to marry your half-brother in those times; there just weren't enough people on earth for people to start getting picky about incest.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“Sarah wasn't even called Sarah yet: she was still going by her birth name Sarai, but that name's warrior vibes didn't suit her and so mostly everyone just called her Sari.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland

“Inside, Katherine opened Sarah’s refrigerator and, from between leathery unwrapped burrito halves and Tupperwares holding bluing sludge, took out a wheel of cheap Brie still in its plastic and set it down on the counter. “I like your apartment,” she said. “Sorry it’s so messy,” said Sarah. Katherine shrugged. “Bukowski said that people with clean kitchens have detestable spiritual qualities.”
― Sam Cohen, Sarahland