Laurel Briley > Recent Status Updates

“We must come to grief and regret anyway—and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities.”

“No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed”

“For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else’s… and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth…”

“…why should we? and why should we not?”

“It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.”

“…the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another”

“Recognizing enoughness is a radical act in an economy that tells us to consume more.”

À quoi ça sert d’être sur la terre si c’est pour faire nos vies à genoux?

“In any case, I don’t need anything else. The tenderness he sets aside for me is enough.”

“Love from those who cannot damage us irreparably often feels insufficient; we may think, rightly or wrongly, that their love does not matter at all.”

“Details beget details. With all those details, one might hope for the full picture. A full picture of what, though? The more we remember, the less we understand.”

“Can we say that sunlight moves with wings, and moonlight as if on the back of a snail?”

“You and I are like day and night.”
“What do you mean?”
“Is there an hour that is neither day nor night?” she said.
“No. So you see, you and I together, we cover all the time, we have everything between us.”

“I want to think of reading not as productivity, but as a kind of produce, something that grows in whatever unpredictable way it will—sometimes smooth and beautiful and delicious, sometimes bitter and gnarled and thorny.”

“I have an idea. We grow your happiness as best and mine as potato. If one crop fails, we still have the other. We won’t be starved.”
“What if we both fail?” I asked.
“We’ll become butchers.”

“Sometimes the October light that flared up suddenly in the west windows on those afternoons was clinical, terrifying in its radiance, and its brilliance and chill seemed like a promise of something unbearable, like the inhuman glow of old memories recalled on a deathbed, all dreams and lucid farewells.”

“I still believe that everything I have, every last butter bean and incomplete thought, is one of many ordinary blessings, something I do no deserve.”

“It is easy to forget one’s need for these things: fresh air, time spent alone.”

“…she sees how happiness hides in the humdrum, how it abides in the everyday toing and froing as though happiness were a thing that should not be seen, as though it were a note that cannot be heard until it sounds from the past…”

“Eventually they found that time weighed heavily upon them, even though it was so precious.”

“Oh, the lengths this family would go to so as not to spoil the picture of how things were supposed to be!”

“Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of creation.”

“What continues to surprise me, and what I still don’t understand, is not the reasons that love ends but the was it endures.”

“We are taught that love is not so different from hatred, that instead of opposites, the two extremes of the human heart might in fact be twins. But it’s grief, really, that is love’s twin, that knows no bounds of time or space. Wave after wave it keeps coming, whereas hatred cools, fades.”

“I wanted us to be like rocks or anchors, keeping each other in place. Love, I’d read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity.”

“It is easy, I have learned, to mistake solitude for softness, for depth.”

“Somebody… should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.”

“You said no-one had ever liked you for what you really were, you were always playing a role to make people accept you, but with me you stood up straight and didn’t feel you had to sing if you wanted to show me your teeth, like the wolf in the story.”

“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing.”

“A photograph can say ‘This is what it was.’ Language can only say ‘This is what it was like.’”