Bee! > Recent Status Updates

“To be a scientist is to learn to live one’s life with questions that will never be answered, with the knowledge that one was too early or too late, with the anguish of not having been able to guess at the solution that, once presented, seems so obvious that one can only curse oneself for not seeing what one ought to have, if only one had looked in a slightly different direction.”

“…but I suppose I had thought until that point that there were a few absolutes in the world—that certain behaviors or acts, like murder, were inherently wrong, and others inherently correct. But my time on Ivu’ivu taught me that all ethics or morals are culturally relative.”

“But time, I’ve come to realize, is not for us to fill in such great, blank slabs: we
speak of managing time, but it is the opposite—our lives are filled with busyness because those thin chinks of time are all we can truly master.”

“To fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life.”

“A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.”

“I see now that when Norma flowered in our garden I became a weed, allowed to exist only where I would not be seen, in corners and dark places.”

“Only a short time ago, I learned that people laughed at me. Now I can see that unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts most of all.”

“Even a feeble minded man wants to be like other men.”

“How can I make him understand that he did not create me?”

“‘But I’m not an inanimate object,’ I argued. ‘I’m a /person/.’
He looked confused for a moment and then laughed. ‘Of course, Charlie. But I wasn’t referring to now. I meant before the operation.’”

“People think it’s funny when a dumb person can't do things the same way they can.”

"If they gave him enough time— if they didn't rush him or push him too fast— he would get it. But nobody has time.”

“That is what I’m hoping you will understand—every story we read, Sang Ly, is about us, in one way or another.”

“In literature, everything means something.”

“If people realized someone would be sorting through their trash, would they be more careful in what they throw away?”

“Sang Ly, we /are/ literature—our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow.”

“Without faith, there is no refuge.”

“‘You know, it’s funny the way you said that.’
‘The way I said what?’ Mosscap asked.
‘That you don’t need /an object to facilitate that feeling/.’ Dex gave a single chuckle. ‘You /are/ an object facilitating that feeling. The feeling’s coming from /you/, after all.’”

finally on the reading grind again

Read this a few days ago, forgot to update…

“You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you’d fight the world. You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t, something it had no wish to be.”

“‘You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing.’”

"...because no child should ever be so used to fitting around a parent that they will suggest the food they least like themselves."

"She lives trying not to set a match to Gordon's anger, but still she spills petrol about her, dripping it over shoes she has forgotten to polish, sloshing it across a particular shirt not washed in time. She races from thing to thing, tending to whatever might spark, but it's always something behind her, just out of sight that she hadn't thought of."

"'Why does it matter? To Dad, I mean. The same-name thing.'

Cora wants to say it matters because sometimes big men feel small inside. Because some people-like Gordon's father-travel through life believing themselves so far beyond improvement, they come to think their children, and their children's children, should all be made in their name."

"After Doreen left, I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should anymore. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired."

"It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one."

"I knew you'd decide to be alright again."

"The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you."

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."

"Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves."

"Does he exist in the same way I exist?
'You do not exist,' said O'Brien."

"She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated."

are we serious rn.

"And in front of him, there lay not death, but annihilation"

"The consequences of every act are included in the act itself."

"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death."