abbey walker > Recent Status Updates

“When I put down my pen, I meant to put away my memories with it.”

“She was not of our clay, she was a goddess, and we must not think that by worshipping her we could lower her to our level.”

“I was a conformist: it never occurred to me that because I suffered, there was something wrong with the system, or with the human heart.”

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

“We can do and be so much for each other – but only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”

“Why must we treat what are obviously systemic problems as failures of individual morality?”

“Imagining someone as more than human does much the same work as imagining them as less than human: either way, the ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else’s.”

“But as a friend once told me, ‘Nothing is so privileged just thinking history belongs to the past.’”

“In my opinion, the one who’s smarter than all the rest is the one who calls himself a fool at least once a month — an unheard of talent nowadays!”

“You don’t know with what paradise I would’ve surrounded you. The paradise was in my soul; I would have planted it all around you! Well, you wouldn’t have loved me — so be it, what of it?”

“I do not wish and cannot believe that evil is mankind’s normal state.”

“Alas, I have always loved sorrow and grief, but only for myself, for myself, but for them I wept, pitying them. I held out my hands to them, in despair, accusing, cursing and despising myself.”

“Like a nasty trichina, like an atom of the plague infecting entire nations, I infected with myself this earth that until my appearance had been happy and without sin. They learned how to lie and they grew to love lies and came to know the beauty of lies.”

“Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.”

“Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself.”

“Follow you? To the end of the world. Kick me with your felt boots if you like, I won’t say a word!”

“We never allowed our parents their unhappiness, I said, and we never allowed them their individuality, before they were shackled to parenthood.”

“I would summon her to narrate the simplest interaction when I tried to untangle the layers of an argument, when I edited footage, when I was dressing up for an event. I called on the anthropologist to examine our lives as we moved from place to place, where we were never natives. What would she write down in her pad if asked to study Manu and me as a tribe of our own?”

“What pride could I, a newborn, babe, possibly injured? What physical immorality effect warranted my mother’s coldness? Was I a child spawned by duty, a chance birth, a life that was a constant reproach?”

“She would say this a little regretfully, as though I hadn’t turned out entirely as she’d expected. No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn’t do badly by one another, we did as well as most.”

“You believe in a divine being, and in this thing we call humanity.
You never did manage to win me over.
I could never believe in the existence of being who watches over us with consummate love.
I couldn’t even make it through the Lord’s prayer without the words drying up in my throat.
Forgive us, our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
I forgive no one, and no one forgives me.”

“Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times, when committing such action in wartime had won them a handsome reward. It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such a uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.”