Anne > Recent Status Updates

This is the kind of love that wars start over. But it will leave the world better than it found it.

We had a love that would never leave the world better than it found it. But it was what we had. And it was better than nothing.

Most of us live normal, unremarkable lives for most of our lives. It’s in those rare small moments when we’re called to action that define us.

Love is self-sustaining. It doesn’t get weak and die when you don’t feed it. Even when I put it away, locked it up, shut in the deepest recesses of my heart, I still loved her in the dark. I could love her from a distance. I could love her in silence. I could love her without even wanting to.

She discovers that it is possible to cry all day and all night. That there are many different ways to cry: the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes.

She is hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial. She might disintegrate, break apart, like a raindrop hitting a leaf. She cannot leave this place, she cannot pass through this gate. She cannot leave him here.

How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.

They cannot both live: he sees this and she sees this. There is not enough life, enough air, enough blood for both of them. Perhaps there never was. And if either of them is to live, it must be her. He wills it. He grips the sheet, tight, in both hands. He, Hamnet, decrees it. It shall be.

You will stay, is what he whispers, and I will go. He sends these words into her: I want you to take my life. It shall be yours. I give it to you.

How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain.

He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him.

How easy is it, Agnes thinks, as she lifts the plates, to miss the pain and anguish of one person, if that person keeps quiet, if he keeps it all in, like a bottle stoppered too tightly, the pressure inside building and building, until – what?
Agnes doesn’t know.

There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence.

Do not dismiss someone's beliefs because you do not understand them, Mistress.

Took me a long time to realize that just because you don’t recognize the fight they choose doesn’t mean they’re not fighting.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all, I still know quite certainly, that just to be alive, is a grand thing.

- Agatha Christie, 1890–1976

You are the flood, Vanessa. You pour into me, washing away everything that I used to think mattered and then filling me up to the top until I’m drowned in nothing but you.

I liked that she didn’t feel the need to impress me and I didn’t feel the need to impress her. There was something comforting about it, about just being you in whatever state you happened to be in.

Life is no excuse. You should always have an adventure lined up. Having something to look forward to is tantamount to happiness.

“Sometimes we just have to wait long enough, Mistress,” he said. “Then we find out why exactly it was that we kept believing.”

Anyone can believe in someone, or something, that always succeeds, Mistress. But failure . . . ah, now, that is hard to believe in, certainly and truly. Difficult enough to have value, I think.

Belief isn’t simply a thing for fair times and bright days, I think. What is belief—what is faith—if you don’t continue in it after failure?

If men read these words, let them know that power is a heavy burden. Seek not to be bound by its chains.

It may be easy to dismiss this kind of superstition, but we all unjustly stigmatize others. We all engage in the punitive act of giving a disease a meaning.

It was long believed, for example, that cancer resulted from social isolation, or from bottling up one’s feelings. Even when these explanations are cruel and dehumanizing, we embrace them—because tiger got to sleep, and bird got to land, and man got to tell himself he understand.

Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.

Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning.

- Susan Sontag

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”

- Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle

Treating disease—whether through herbs or magic or drugs—is unnatural. No other animals do it, at least not with anything approaching our sophistication. Hospitals are unnatural, as are novels and saxophones. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world. And yet we tell ourselves that some—and only some—lives end naturally (which really means “acceptably” or “well”).

“Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.”