deats > Recent Status Updates

i’ve never known sickness -or sorrow, or disaster, for that matter- not to unfold, eventually, like a flower or a good memo. we're required only to keep looking. seymour once said, on the air, when he was eleven, that the thing he loved best. in the Bible was the word WATCH!

and poetry, surely, is a crisis, perhaps the only actionable one we can call our own

samuel hamilton and adam trask said “we cant name these kids cain and abel bc it would be too on the nose, so we’ll just call them cal and aron, which is totally different <3”

i like how cathy has all these meticulously laid plans but then every couple chapters she has two drinks and ruins her own life again

what the FUCK just about every other sentence kicks me full force in the stomach. too good to pick favorites but a few that stuck

“his conscience bridged him to his brother and did his pain for him the way at other times he had done his homework.”

“i love you better. else why would i have given myself the trouble of hurting you?”

He had written, in letters that had not quite jelled yet, the single word "Delighted." The Matron of Honor, reading over my shoulder, gave a sound faintly like a snort, but I quickly looked over at the great writer and tried to show by my expression that all of us in the car knew a poem when we saw one, and were grateful.

little newt threw up. and then we all wanted to throw up. newt certainly did what was called for. “i couldn’t agree more” i told newt.

we give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness, zigzagging every side

- i felt, for the first time, one of my favorite feelings in the world: the feeling of sarah’s gaze and mine meeting and entwining, as we looked a third thing.

- life itself, which makes of earth and starlight something more than earth and starlight.

- we’re hard wired to look for patterns, to make constellations from the stars. there must be some logic to the narrative, some reason for the misery.

more favorites

- finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion. it is a prerequisite for survival.

- meaninglessness all the way down

- and yes, home is that house where you no longer live. home is before, and you live in after. but home is also what you are building and maintaining today.

-i don’t like crowds, but i like this crowd. because i’m in an us that doesnt require a them.

some fav quotes on reread:

- to me though, the hand stencils say “i was here.” they say “you are not new.”

- he offered us the place ribs don’t protect, trusting that we weren’t going to bite or stab him.

- there is something deep within me, something intensely fragile, that is terrified of turning itself to the world. i know that if i’m hit where i am earnest, i will never recover.

“in the anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers, there are only participants. when people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir.”