Katie McAlister > Recent Status Updates

“Mere despair never tells the whole human story, as much as despair would like to insist otherwise. Hopelessness has the insidious talent of explaining everything: the reason X or Y sucks is that everything sucks, the reason you’re miserable is because misery is the correct response to the world as we find it, and so on…. I know its powerful voice… it just doesn’t happen to be true.”

“For those of us with congenital conditions, disability shapes all we are. Those disabled later in life adapt. We take constraints no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy and pleasures peculiarly our own. We have something the world needs.”

“But I have trouble with basing life-and-death decisions on market considerations when the market is structured by prejudice.”

“… Disability is mutable and ever-evolving. Disability is both apparent and non-apparent. Disability is pain, struggle, brilliance, abundance and joy. Disability is socio-political, cultural and biological. Being visible and claiming a disabled identity brings risks as much as it brings pride.”

“… The mourners huddled under their umbrellas as the rain pounded the sodden ground. ‘Sometimes,’ McCann said, ‘we are imprisoned within ideals.”

“If a spy takes fifty lives but saves some larger number, can that countenance his actions? This kind of logic is seductive, but perilous. You start out running numbers in your head, and pretty soon you are sanctioning mass murder.”

“‘I’ll wear no convict’s uniform/ Nor meekly serve my time/ That Britain might/ Brand Ireland’s fight / Eight hundred years of crime’”

“…from where I’m standing, hope seems a lot like white liquor. It can fool you in the short run, but like as not, you’ll end up paying for it twice.”

“White sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone…I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew…an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.”

“All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I’d ever seen began to pop into my mind— the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.”