Michelle > Recent Status Updates

“Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonised as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.”

“…and I don't call you handsome, sir, though I love you most dearly: far too dearly to flatter you. Don't flatter me."
Hahahahahaha

“There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.”

Oh, do I love to yearn

“It is a very nice song”, he said, “I like it. Perhaps it means just what I mean when I want to shout out that I’m thankful to the magic… perhaps they are both the same thing. How can we know the exact names of everything? Sing it again… how does it begin? ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow’?”

Kids need to make more mischief like this

“What if I lost you?… I pulled back from you. If I didn’t feel as much to begin with then it wouldn’t come as hard when—not if—but when, my fears came to pass again.”

The way he words things doesn’t always make sense but I am eating it up

“Life, I’d learned, is a revolving door. Most things that come into it only stay awhile… There was no point in clinging to something that wasn’t really yours.”
Uh oh, this book is going to make me cry, isn’t it?

Four whole pages about Carcharodontosaurs wow!

“Because for once in my life, I don’t feel like I’m on the sidelines. For once, I’m in the photo.”

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.”