Michelle Woo > Recent Status Updates

I remembered thinking, as I very rarely thought, what a flimsy thing the law was, so dependent on contingencies, a system of so little comfort, of so little use to those who needed its protections the most.

“I’m lonely,” he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.

Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.

Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this one.

“He wished, as he often did, that the entire sequence—the divulging of intimacies, the exploring of pasts—could be sped past, and that he could simply be teleported to the next stage, where both parties’ limits were understood and respected”

“The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on”

‘Preachin’ is tellin’ folks stuff. I’m askin’ ‘em. That ain’t preachin’ is it?’

Marianne, he said, I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.

It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

I saw the quarrel had merely effected closer intimacy—had broken the outworks of youthful timidity, and enabled them to forsake the disguise of friendship, and confess themselves lovers.

She was content with the faint affect of romance, rather than it’s realization.

Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.

Looking at that boy’s life, Jin-su said, what is this thing we call a soul? Just some nonexistent idea? Or something that might as well not exist?

If life was the summer that had just gone by, if life was a body sullied with sweat and bloody pus, clotted seconds that refused to pass, if life was a mouthful of sour bean sprouts that only served to intensify the hunger pangs, then perhaps death would be like a clean brushstroke, erasing all such things in a single sweep.

It wasn’t as though we didn’t know how overwhelmingly the army outnumbered us. But the strange thing was, it didn’t matter. Ever since the uprising began, I’d felt something coursing through me, as overwhelming as any army.

She had no faith in humanity. The look in someone’s eyes, the beliefs they espoused, the eloquence with which they did so, were, she knew, no guarantee of anything.

How long do souls linger by the side of their bodies? Do they really flutter away like some kind of bird? Is that what trembles the edges of the candle flame?

“This rain is tears shed by the souls of the departed”

"To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet"

“An old college professor of mine once said a fundamental tenant of logic theory is that, from a false premise, any implication is true”

“It’s almost refreshing, then, when one is faced with the ugliest and yet most honest face of Western apathy, the face that knows full well the scale and severity of the horror but believes it absolutely justified, absolutely necessary.” [TBC in comments]

“American liberalism demands a rhetorical politeness from which the fascistic iteration of the modern Republican Party is fully free. There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same Administration bankrolls their butcher…” (TBC in comments)

“When those dying are deemed human enough to warrant discussion, discussion must be had. When they’re deemed nonhuman, discussion becomes offensive, an affront to civility”

“As always, the dead will be made to pay the moral debt born of their killing. At the start of this campaign, one-oft parroted justification was the nonsensical contrivance that Palestinians and Gaza were subject to a collective guilt on account of their voting for Hamas. It is somewhat pointless to note that most of the Gazans are too young to have voted for Hamas in the most recent election...[TBC in Comments]

“Western liberalism is—an I have no useful definition of it beyond something at its core transactional, centered on the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self and the dissonant belief that empathizing with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefiting from the systems that oppress them—it subscribes to this calculus”

"Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear"

“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of Power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.”

"Dewey had imagined that with the deaths of Smith and Hickock, he would experience a sense of climax, release, of a design justly completed. Instead, he discovered himself recalling an incident of almost a year ago, a casual encounter in Valley View Cemetery, which, in retrospect, had somehow for him more or less ended the Clutter case."

“A man can do a lot of damage in the church. When someone comes here, he’s got his guard up. But in the church a man’s wide open.”