Sarah Pinsker > Quotes

“It’s okay to be afraid, but we don’t have to let it rule us. We’re all afraid; it’s what we do when we’re afraid that matters.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“Fear is a virus. Music is a virus and a vaccine and a cure.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“Places would open again soon, I was sure, when people stopped accepting the government-fueled paranoia as normal.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“Hate was reserved for front-page villains. Abstractions: the pox, the bombers, the bombs, the gunmen, the guns, the chaos they sowed, the politicians who wielded restriction in the name of freedom and safety, or the ones who didn’t stop them, or the ones who were sure it would only be temporary.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“They’ve grounded all planes. Schools are canceled tomorrow.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“politicians who wielded restriction in the name of freedom and safety, or the ones who didn’t stop them, or the ones who were sure it would only be temporary”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“Everybody is afraid; it’s what you do when you’re afraid that counts. The world isn’t over yet.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“A river says move on, move on, move on. Flood your banks, alter your borders.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“Editing isn’t only for books and television, Mara. Tell your own story as you want it told.”
― Sarah Pinsker, Haunt Sweet Home

“We all felt our world slipping away, in cascades and cataracts, the promises of temporary change becoming less and less temporary. Didn’t we feel so much safer? Weren’t safe and healthy worth more to us than large weddings and overcrowded schools? Hadn’t the pox been spread by people working and attending school when they should have stayed home? Never mind that they didn’t stay home because they couldn’t afford to. The talking heads were in agreement that necessity would fuel innovation. Good things were coming fast, they promised; I stopped watching the news.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“In that moment, she remembered Chris Bethel, pre-transition, playing Viola in Twelfth Night like a person who knew what it was to be shipwrecked on a strange shore. Good for him.”
― Sarah Pinsker, Two Truths and a Lie

“The rents went back to manageable when all the rich people left.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“Why We Jump We jump because we have to. We jump because we can. We jump because we dare ourselves. We jump because we’re lonely. We jump because we want to be alone. We jump because once you’re up there’s really no other good way down. We jump because otherwise we’ll never do anything that matters. We jump because we want to fly, just for a moment. We jump because everything is better afterward: beer, breathing, sandwiches, sex. We jump because the water is clear and deep. We jump because there are so few things in life that can’t be explained away. We jump because we want to know what happens when the pond takes somebody. We jump because we don’t want that somebody to be us, or maybe we do. We jump because otherwise we will never know who we are. We jump because we want to know what else there is to be. We jump because we don’t want to be the kind of person who wouldn’t. We jump because each of us knows we are the invincible center of the world. We jump because we want to be We jump because”
― Sarah Pinsker, Lost Places

“It's hard to hold a grudge standing beside a river. A river says move on, move on, move on. Flood your banks, alter your borders.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“She understood: sometimes the performance was the music, and vice versa, and the two couldn't be separated.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“Would you mind calling up a little later after the light goes?”
—Georgia O’Keeffe.”
― Sarah Pinsker, Lost Places

“She blew her next moment of cool by pushing on a pull door.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“Mine doesn’t supersede the story of people like you who got left behind by a tech fad that took over everything.”
― Sarah Pinsker, We Are Satellites

“Like running, cooking was for Val a solitary pursuit. A conversation with herself, a personal contemplation.”
― Sarah Pinsker, We Are Satellites

“The real-time monitors stayed on the performers. The holo took a stomach-churning leap to match up, then they were restored to three-dimensionality. It was a strange relief, an escape from an uncanny valley.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“You are all you, we are all we, constantly shaped by and shaping worlds.”
― Sarah Pinsker, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea

“The Peach, our destination, had an old-fashioned marquee out front. An old-fashioned marquee with my name on it. TONIGHT: LUCE CANNON. I had seen my name on chalkboards and posters, but never on a marquee before.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“How do you know me so well when I don't even know myself that well? I'm so sick of not knowing. I feel like this unfinished lump of a person.”
― Sarah Pinsker, Haunt Sweet Home

“airplane hangar? A server center? No: Superwally distribution. As I got closer, I saw that what I’d assumed were starlings or sparrows were in fact drones, rising in a stream, a flock, a cloud, to head to points unknown. Self-driving trucks, drone delivery. No jobs for the humans, other than consumption, which was itself a full-time occupation. What a weird world we’d created. As I drove through Frederick’s empty downtown to pick up my next small road, I was struck by the reasonableness of it all. The transaction we’d made. Of course it made sense to trade company for safety. To trade jobs as makers for jobs as consumers, consuming from the comfort of our homes. We’d set ourselves up.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“greek chorus back for an encore of their greatest hit, “i told you so.”—”
― Sarah Pinsker, Lost Places

“a conspiracy against despair.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“There was a fir tree that had fallen across the water like a bad-idea bridge. They examined the tangled, tentacular roots and everything that had upended with them, imagining what it was like to be torn from your place in a larger whole.”
― Sarah Pinsker, Lost Places

“The spatter on the carpet suggested somebody had knifed a Muppet and let it crawl away to die.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“Rosemary had been to a wave pool once when she was five, at a run-down amusement park, in the Before.”
― Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day

“Safe is the most dangerous.”
― Sarah Pinsker, We Are Satellites