Michelle > Recent Status Updates

I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing.

“A couple days before I turned ten, I had this idea," I say. "If I chose one thing I really wanted— and knew I could actually get—on my birthday, then no matter what else happened or didn't, it’d be a good day.”

“I feel a kind of breathless happy-sad. Like I'm missing this night before it's even begun. Every time he offers me more of him, it gets harder not to have it all.”

“Maybe that was how it was with all first loves. They own a little piece of your heart, always.”

“…and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.”

“The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil…
So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time.”

“People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb… Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don't heal, they die.”

Geeze, I’m already sobbing.

“…our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that’s how we learn to figure out our horizons.”

“He runs after her, but of course he doesn’t stand a chance, he’s a grown man and they don’t have a clue about how to run. Grown men don’t have enough things they’re afraid of on this planet to become good at running.”

“We know that because all the rich people at the auction keep saying to each other: ‘Did you know this is an old church?’ Because rich people love reminding each other about how incredibly rich they are, so rich that they can buy things from God.
In a couple of days, at the start of Easter, obviously no one will spare a thought for God… because then God won’t have anything interesting to sell to them.”

Sarah really makes you so tired of the pages and pages of battles described in real time, and the back and forth, that you’re not so sad at the thought of getting close to the end of the book/series.
All of the details in between keep me holding on, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever been both so bored and so invested in a story.

“He had been so afraid—so afraid of magic, of loss, of everything. And that fear… it had driven him to it anyway.”