soph > Recent Status Updates

“and it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children. the problem with fixating on the abyss into which one’s opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one’s own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.”

“maybe we don’t read writers so much as become deeply acquainted with the sites of their passing, or their refusal to pass. what they thought beautiful or grotesque enough to document. where they chose to expend their finite capacity for concern” (101).

“for now, a motorist made late for work or a colonizer’s portrait disfigured provokes more of a political response than any number of dead foreign kids can.”

“it is a hallmark of failing societies, i’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist” (14).

“it’s come to shape the way i think about every country, every community: whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever this nonexistence is violated?” (20).

thank you gumberg library for the free copy <3 only now realizing how well that connects to the whole idea of this book haha

i have to read a couple chapters for crit lit but i figured i might as well do the whole thing while im at it. i was hating at first bc i didn’t feel like reading such a male-centered story but now that i’ve given myself some time to sit down with it i really like it

“He said at the last minute the cute one with the braids decided on ten cents' worth of Chiclets, cinnamon, yellow, green. He dug around in the jar but he couldn't find any cinnamon ones. He will never forgive himself that he couldn't find any cinnamon ones. His wife wept for the little things that could have made the girls last minutes happier.“

sobbing it’s the little bits of humanity

“love isn’t something you can cup in your hands, and i have to believe that means it’s something that can’t ever be lost.”

reading for lit crit. i’m already obsessed!

“the last bite of cheesecake. the final sip of wine. the bracing cool of the lake. to be kissed. to be held. to be protected” (292).

“it’s easy to be around people who don’t know you. but as soon as someone starts to figure you out - as soon as you can’t be perfect - it’s easier to move on. find someone new to be the cool, fun, laid-back one with” (299).

“at puberty many young women begin to develop a body shape that deviates from that considered fashionable . . . male puberty creates an appearance that society desires.”
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“I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw—the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time to sit and smoke . . . Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!”

“the occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. it was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”

“‘you’ll always be sad about this,’ mia said softly. ‘but it doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. it’s just something that you have to carry.’”

i am so so stressed there’s no way that this ends well

already love love love this so much

“death takes what you have allowed it to. murder is just a way shaking death’s hand and telling him ‘what is mine, is yours’”

“we’re like everyone else, i guess. we promise that something is forever, when it is really only as long as it takes for us to tire of it”

“i think of death these days as a companion i long to meet”

“this is the fire you must walk through”

white girl depression ily

“never does the world lean a bit for me, cast a vote, and cause an eye to open… see the man… see the way his eyes are frozen in the image of my face in a scream… i sit awaiting his arrival, kept awake by the notion that i shall grow accustomed to the dark far easier than he to the light.
laura”