Status Updates From Seek Immediate Shelter

“We made the same mistakes,” Jodie said faintly. “You can’t be that much smarter than me if you fucked up the same way I did.”

“And that was how?”

“Trusting a man who betrayed you.”

“I guess you never really realize how much of yourself you give up when you decide to love someone.”

“You’re only entitled to the outcomes of a very, very small number of decisions in your life. You know that, right? And you can try to delay some of those big choices, but when you do, your options change, too. You can’t expect the world to stay still for you.”

And he thought, just because someone loved you, just because someone did his best, did not mean he was incapable of hurting you to the point of breaking.

It took so long, sometimes, for emotions to catch up. To converge. It could take an entire life to understand who you were and what you feared. There was hardly any time-only a moment, if you were lucky- to gather up your courage.

How strange, how inconceivable, certain situations might seem, until you were alive in them. Each phase of life was so alienated from the others.

“We need classifications in order to make sense of the world .. It’s probably more productive to ask yourself why you’ve been given certain labels by people whom you love and trust.”

.. modernity’s moral superiority

Difficult to imagine something like time ending, when it could hardly be said to exist in the first place.

… not imbuing in her a proper terror of the world and its people and their capacity for cruelty

… love was the most basement feeling you had for your children. You loved them, first and foremost. And then you built the rest of your feelings atop it.

“Everyone feels deserving of an audience. People used to think having a voice was enough. You had your voice and you earned your audience.”