Maria > Recent Status Updates

“‘Remember how my Grandad and my Pop-Pop were vets who'd been to war and fought and all that? And your dad? Why didn't they ever talk about it? Why didn't they tell us how awful it was? I don't have a single memory of any of them talking about how bad it was—or what it was even like. I keep wondering why they wouldn't want us to know.’”

“Family plots were practical, she supposed. The ones she found unsettling were the double stones for spouses when one of them was still alive—the wife, usually, her birth date
followed by a dash and then nothing, like an unfinished sentence… What was it like to visit your husband's grave and each time see your own waiting for you, and that unfinished sentence? Would you feel like you were holding things up?“

"He says he was hoping you would find him. He says he loves you, Felix. He wants you to know that.
And he says this—that you have to keep swimming. You're the one in the water, and you're the one who has to swim." 😭

"’Don't apologize,’ Bishop said. ‘It makes sense to me. Why do you think they didn't want us to pack anything, going over? They knew we were going to be bringing a lot of shit home.’”

“She couldn't imagine getting through something like that as a parent and said as much, but Mrs. Dodson said time helped. Time was like a rock bed with a lot of layers, she said, then took a moment to find the word she wanted: strata. Even the most unbearable things became fossils, after a while.”

I’m a Paladin parent!

“the kid, after all, is a messenger, and Bishop Bagger always said that's what angels were above all else, messengers climbing up and down Jacob's ladder between heaven and earth,

and if the job being offered to Bagger is to serve as a bodyguard to messengers, two of them now, he accepts, what a gift that the most cataclysmic event in history has handed him a reason to live, not to simply survive but to live,”

Library loan expired 😱

“It occurs to me that if faced with an end-of-the-world choice of companion, Stephen Fry or certain drama critics—no contest.”

“I wound up sending thirty dollars… of course, it was also woefully inadequate-a tiny drop in the ocean of reparations required for me to make up for being a colonizer, and benefitting from white supremacy, and living on stolen land, and gentrifying the Eighth Ward…”

Every damn page is written like this and it’s seriously grating me. The action is finally starting to pick up though

Maddie’s about to go to a Black church — I was cringing too hard so I had to stop.

The book is quick to lay out a sympathetic case for Maddie — which is vital because she is really obnoxious and unlikable from the get-go. I am still very unclear on the politics of this novel, and I have concerns…

“What I really loved, what I love, is having-painted… Making something that would never have existed in the entirety of humanity had I not been there at that specific moment to make it. I resented work for this reason more than any other. The countless paintings that would never exist because I had to be working for money instead of painting. I resented my body for the same reasons…”

“Cyrus was trying desperately to keep himself upright. He scoured his mind to find the vital information around how to stand like a person, how to inhabit a body, but there was only shadow, shadows of half-remembered shadows. He felt like a windmill stilled in a field… All Cyrus could hear was ringing in his brain, some ear cell's final song, a frequency never to be heard again.”

“If he'd had a block of marble he could've carved the David. If he'd had a sword he could have sliced through a car. If he'd had a mother she'd be delirious with pride, holding him against her chest, wiping away his tears.”

“I had made the dress like I had made the tablecloth, out of pain and long work, and I knew how much of both it had taken to make it. And so I knew how much that dress would have cost, that he had put her in, and I did not want to think of how it had been paid.”

Loving Magra’s sections 👌

“‘There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That is what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away. That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.”

“‘I can't change silver to gold for you in your kingdom...’

“‘Of course you can, mortal girl,’ he said over his shoulder, as if I was the one being a fool. ‘A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.’ And then he stepped forward and the heavy door swung shut in my face, leaving me with a casket full of silver coins and a belly full of dismay.”

"’Schopenhauer argued that all art is merely representational and allegorical except for music, which is the closest thing to pure will,’ he told her. ‘But I find in our pentagrams some thing akin to music. Not in its total abstraction from everyday phenomena, but in its ability to pierce through to the center of them. That shining, cloudless plane of truth on which nothing else matters.’”