Michele > Recent Status Updates

“Women do not leave situations like this: we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, ‘What do you need? Tell me what you need and by God I will do it.’ I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I’ve heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.

“Of course, if there is one lesson grief teaches, it is that there is no sense in some things. Still, I know if Ruth’s mother were alive, she would handle this, draw from the reservoir of sacred strength that women are born with.”

It started out strong, the writing is wonderful but I lost interest after a few chapters. I made it through 100 pages which was once my “rule,” I couldn’t abandon a book until I’d read that far along. Eh. Life’s too short. Moving on.

“I watch more and more television, my glowing friend, the one thing in the house that does not yell or cry, that won’t use me to send messages to others.”

Giving up here, I just can’t continue on with this book. So overdone, so repetitious, I am just bored.

“But she never does. She never comes to. I can't make sense of it. If my weight isn't enough to get Mom to wake up, then nothing will be. And if nothing can wake her up, then that means she's really going to die. And if she's really going to die, what am I supposed to do with myself? My life purpose has always been to make Mom happy, to be who she wants me to be. So without Mom, who am I supposed to be now?”

“Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces than we have no conception of, always it is temporary.”

“Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.”

It’s as natural as being born..and even if we stop being the individuals we once were, here's an immortality of organic molecules..we’ll become part of the grass and trees and animals..we'll stay right here where we loved it while we were alive.People will drink us with their morning milk and pour us as maple syrup over their breakfast pancakes.So I say we should be happy and grateful, and make the most of it.

“There's no decent literature on how to die..Only a lot of religious gobbledygook about being gathered in to God, and a lot of biological talk about returning your elements to the earth…but it doesn't say anything about what religion is talking about, the essential you, the conscious part of you, and it doesn't teach you anything about how to make the transition from being to not-being.”

Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?
The people we are talking about are hangovers from a quieter time. They have been able to buy quiet, and distance themselves from…ugliness. They live behind university walls part of the year, and in a green garden the rest of it.

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? (Cont’d)

“Everything was slightly angled, as if placed there by a drunk on his knees.”
“I followed..into a space that looked like it had been attacked by a cannon that shot out toys.”
“…a package of Fig Newton cookies that looked like it had been ripped open by a wolf.”
2 things I dislike: overuse of similes & forced pop culture references to “prove” the time period. This has both in the first 7 pages. DNF

“Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man.”

“Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man.”

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”

I suppose he has an impulse to bed her right there in the pneumatic moss, reproducing a scene between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper that he has reread several times in a borrowed, bootlegged copy. Her eyes are laughing and alive. I suppose he reaches for her. I suppose she fends him off. That is what girls did in 1933. They walk again.

“All the little [children] around Aunt Emily are getting an imprinting that will last for life. The sound of her voice reading will condition how they look upon themselves and the world. It will become .. a glint in the chromatic wonder of childhood. These small sensibilities will never lose the images of dark woods and bright lake. Nature to them will always be beneficent and female.”

Cont’d,..”And it’s these moments that one feels yes, the same blood runs in is all and these things are really me too. All these things are, we Alan Watts said, extensions of myself. And I think how beautiful, how really great I am. I am this tree and I am that flower and I am not separate from them.”

There are mornings when the sun pours in in the sky is that kind of blue you know you’ve never seen before. And the quality of the white clouds floating and the geraniums blooming indoors and the floor and carpets and all the colors and shapes are new too. These moments are very intense because you can hardly believe that this beauty exists every day when you were going faster or you have your back turned to it.

“I didn’t tell him I had sat with the tangle of it, needing and wanting and loving, and didn’t know if it was ever possible to be fully certain if I loved him as long as my safety was based on him.”

“…spend your life worrying because it feels like every day someone with power is doing something to take things from you for no good reason except for them keeping their power, it’s hard to build a community. You can’t even think about changing anything because by the time you’re a woman in your 20s, unless you’re very lucky, you most likely are only thinking about how to survive.”

“.everything was simultaneously right and wrong. Like with witches.We still thought of them as something taboo, criminal, bad, but there was a weird space where because of capitalism, they were still everywhere because they made money ..capitalism allowed anything to exist as long as someone could exploit it for money and power.And those things seem to make room only for loneliness when it came to most people.”

“In every room I wished my parents would tell me how to be the kind of person they could love, that they could like, that they could always be there for, because I was so tired of feeling not good enough.”