Natalia Fiore > Recent Status Updates

“Junie couldn’t save her sister in life. Maybe she can save her in death. What made Keats tough enough to look death in the eye? What gave Thoreau the mettle to wander into the woods with nothing but pen and paper? She needs a way to mend together the threads of a life that’s threatening to unravel further than it already has.” (Ch. 8, pp. 78 & 79)

“Once Violet learned to read as a little girl, she insisted on teaching Junie in secret so she’d have someone to talk to about books. Junie took to literature like a fish to water, thrilled to spend her playtime with Violet in the imaginary world of their shared stories. The family forbad her. Junie hadn’t listened. Reading and writing are pleasures worth any punishment, something they can never understand.”

“Over my cot I’d taped pictures together which amounted to a barefaced lie about my background. When asked about them, I’d acquired an accent appropriate to a town three states south of my own, and I’d transmitted the impression, without stating it, that this was the old family place. But now, I was acquiring a sense of my own real authority and worth; I’d had many new experiences, and I was growing up.”

“I am reminded of places in which I’ve overlooked the presence of God — in friendships, in my family, in my community, in nature, in prayer, in the world around me — and I’m filled with a sense of gratitude. This time, I was reminded not only that suffering is a part of everyone’s life, but also that I hadn’t been seeking God as attentively as I could’ve been. I wasn’t paying attention.” (p. 437)

I’ve never forgotten the dazed look on Finny’s face when he thought that on the first day of his return to Devon I was going to desert him. I didn’t know why he’d chosen me, why it was only to me that he could show the most humbling sides of his handicap. I didn’t care. For the war was no longer eroding the peaceful summertime stillness I’d prized at Devon. Peace had come back to Devon for me. (p 109)

“They were all young men not much older than we were and although probably just recruits, they gave the impression of being an elite as they were carried past our drab ranks. They seemed to be having a wonderful time — they were going places. Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.” (Ch. 7, p. 97)

“Not til Jesus speaks her name does Mary know him. She knew that distinctive voice with the Nazarene accent — the voice that called her into wholeness when it expelled whatever demons troubled her, that welcomed her into his circle of friends, that told her she was valued in the eyes of God — because it was a voice that had spoken to her in love. Because sometimes seeing is not believing. Loving is.” (p 406)

“I had known Finny in an impersonal dormitory, a gym, a playing field. In the room we shared at Devon, many strangers had lived before us, and many would afterward. It was there that I had done it, but it was here that I would have to tell it. I felt like a wild man who had stumbled in from the jungle to tear the place apart.” (Chapter 5, p. 69)

“Finny got away with everything because of the extraordinary kind of person he was. It was quite a compliment to me, as a matter of fact, to have such a person chose me for his best friend…
I should’ve told him then that he was my best friend. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped at that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.” (p. 29; p. 48)

“We were in shaky transit from the groveling status of Lower Middlers to the near-respectability of Upper Middlers. The class above, seniors, draft-bait, rushed ahead of us toward the war. They were caught up in accelerated courses, first-aid programs, and a physical hardening regimen which included jumping from this tree. We were reading Virgil and playing tag in the river. Until Finny thought of the tree.”

Jesus felt abandoned. This isn’t to say that he despaired. But it’s not unreasonable to imagine his feeling as if the Father were absent. Having faced the betrayal of his closest friends, brutalized by Roman guards, marched through the streets under a crushing weight, and nailed to a cross, Jesus could be forgiven for feeling abandoned. He who has abandoned himself to God’s will now wonders ‘Where are you?’

“The most difficult thing may be the crushing inevitability. You want to escape from your life which suddenly feels like an oncoming train about to run you down. It’s the shock you feel when you receive a frightening diagnosis. When you’re laid off from a job. When a friend or family member dies. When a relationship ends. You say to yourself, ‘This cannot be happening.’ (Gethsamane, p. 364)

“…In John’s Gospel, the foot washing is more about the mutual service of friendship, a mutual sharing of gifts that in no way implies any sort of domination. The message is not that the master has become the slave, but that all are on the same level. After Jesus has washed the disciples’ feet, he challenges them to do the same for each other and to see that all are equal friends in the kingdom…” (p. 348)

“Beside her brother’s tomb, she is blunt. Martha can be seen as a female counterpart to Peter: a strong, impetuous, outspoken friend of Jesus who believes even as she feels free to question. The memories of her retained in the Gospels are so vivid that she likely was a formidable figure in the early church. Martha’s fierce honesty also reminds us that Jesus included strong women among his circle of friends.”

“I was returning to Perugia to be kind to him — to offer him the chance to feel seen. Not because he deserved it, but because I had it in me...This meeting didn’t have to happen at all. I was making it happen. It was an act of radical empathy and compassion that truly spoke to who I am. I would go to Perugia not to get anything from Giuliano, but to give something to him.” (Preemptive Closure, pp. 230-231)

Books I want to read in 2026:
-A Separate Peace by John Knowles
-Junie by Erin Crosby-Ecstine
-Walden by Henry David Thoreau
-A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Books I’ve been reading that I want to finish in 2026:
-Jesus: A Pilgrimage by Fr. James Martin
-First Belong to God: On Retreat with Pope Francis by Austen Ivereigh

“I knew that the enemy of genuine curiosity was judgement. Judgment is like a fog that clouds our vision; we see reality more clearly when we refrain from casting it. We see people for who they are, flawed and complicated. Seeing this takes away the power from those who judge us.” (p. 181, Dear Guiliano)

“True justice happens when we see our fellow human beings with compassion, when we judge with restraint, and when we return to each other, after pain and enmity, with the courage of an open heart.” (p. 176 “Coraggio”)

It wasn’t just that other people expected me to live in mourning. It was also that a part of me agreed with them. The part of me that felt guilty that I had survived and she hadn’t. The part of me that blurred my identity with Meredith’s, my tragedy with hers. The part of me that was still angry, hurt, and sad because I couldn’t go back to being that kid who boarded that flight to Italy and neither could she.

“By becoming someone else, I started to see who Amanda Knox really was. She would never die by her own hand. Nor would she live out her days forever on the run. What would she/I do? I couldn’t help but remain optimistic. I couldn’t help but see people as essentially good. I couldn’t help but dream that the world was a better place than it had seemed from inside the prison of my name” (The Bunker, p. 101).

“But when I was convicted, my hair suddenly felt like an absurd, even grotesque form of vanity. I wasn’t going home. I was a prisoner. What the f— did I need pretty hair for? The prosecution and the media were calling me a seductress. Cutting my hair off was a big middle finger to those accusations and a stark look in the mirror of my reality.” (‘Self Help’ p. 69)

Don Saulo taught me to value much of the wisdom in the teachings of Jesus. Turning the other cheek, the golden rule, a radical refusal of judgment, an acceptance of all people. No one deserves God’s grace, and yet, it’s there for everyone. That’s how I think of compassion. A part of me knew that true compassion, true mercy, must be extended to everyone — even, and perhaps especially, to those who have hurt us

It is better to live a short life serving others than a long one resisting that call. We already belong to God because God has bound himself to us and longs for us — and nothing we have ever done or will do can change that. We belong first of all to our creator.

What I needed was for the 35 yr old me to travel back in time & tell the confused, terrified 20 yr old that I’d get through the nightmare. Without that reassurance, all I could do was pay it backward in time to 12 year old me. Doing that took the crushing weight of my existential crisis off my shoulders. Looking at what I could control & what I couldn’t gave me the will to make that promise to my younger self.

Susan Sowerby went round their garden and was told the whole story of it and shown every bush and tree which had come alive. Colin walked on one side of her and Mary on the other. Each of them kept looking up at her comfortable rosy face, secretly curious about the delightful feeling she gave them — a sort of warm, supported feeling. It seemed as if she understood them as Dickon understood his creatures (p. 333).

They went to the Indian room and saw more rooms and made more discoveries than Mary had made on her first pilgrimage. They found new corridors and corners and flights of steps and old new pictures they liked and weird old things they didn’t know the use of. The feeling of wandering about in the same house with other people but at the same time feeling as if one were miles away from them was a fascinating thing.

“One evening, Dickon told the whole story with all the thrilling details of the buried key and the robin and the gray haze which had seemed like deadness and the secret Mistress Mary had planned never to reveal. The coming of Dickon and how it had been told to him, the doubt of Colin, and the final drama of his introduction to the hidden domain made Mrs. Sowerby’s nice-looking face change color several times.”

“Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of Magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden — in all the places. The Magic in this garden has made me stand up and know I am going to live to be a man.” (Chapter 23, Magic, p. 287).

“She was saying it to Colin because she wanted to make Magic and keep him on his feet looking like that. She could not bear that he should give in before Ben Weatherstaff. He did not give in. She was uplifted by a sudden feeling that he looked quite beautiful in spite of his thinness. He fixed his eyes on Ben Weatherstaff in his funny imperious way.” (Chapter 22, “When the Sun Went Down”, p. 272)