Status Updates From The Knockout Queen

"Even God can't understand everything," she said.
"I thought that was the whole point of God. That he could understand everything”
"Some things he chooses not to understand," she said.
"What do you mean?" I thought she was cracked, now truly and finally cracked.
"That's the whole point of hell, isn't it? A place to put the people God chooses not to understand?”

"I still love you," I said. "But not like—"
"I love you too."
"Maybe we knew each other in a past life or something," I said.
"Maybe we knew each other in this one."

“I suppose I had thought that I dreamed it. That I was so desperate for love back then that I was willing to project it onto even an old man who lied to me. But it was still here, whatever it was.
I didn't know whether to call it love or joy or just connection, but it was all of those things, and it was generated by our proximity…”

“…cheap cars interspersed with gleaming BMWs…The accused & their attorneys…& I thought that inside the building, the pageant of justice was being performed, as though the contestants had free will, as though anyone could blossom into a hero or a monster through sheer force of character…if you were poor, your car simply had more dings in it…They were not signs of individual moral turpitude.”

“"God, I love you," Anthony said, looking at me with his wet brown eyes, pure and beautiful as the eyes of a deer. I felt I could see him as he had been at every point in his life: as a hopeful little boy, as an arrogant teenager, as an earnest college student, as a tired father, as a man, a brave man, a man who chases after his own vitality and refuses to give up on what is right even when it's wrong.”

“Though of course Ms. Harriet thought of herself as a loving mother. Ms. Harriet lived in a world of doing, where her actions were as clean and formulaic a sheet of Lego instructions. To clothe the child and feed the child and teach the child is to love the child. Those actions are the same as the metaphysical state for a person like Ms. Harriet.