ALEC S > Recent Status Updates

“This fucking place. It gives me a pain in my chest. But that’s not it… it’s in my soul. Never felt this kind of pain before in my life. It’s in the center of me. Right in the middle. It’s been there as long as I can remember.”

“I then watch the likes rack up and up - each one, each little heart, an injection of dopamine into my already dopamined brain. But it’s not enough. Never is.”

“‘I love you,’ I say. It comes out of me instinctively, impulsively again, but this time born of a need so deeply obscured that I don’t know where it originates. It escapes me entirely without deliberation or thought.”

“Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they’re happy - but as soon as I have this thought, I realize its opposite is also true.”

“Everything has to travel so far to come into existence.”

“Dreams inflect our face, our smile, and on our voice lingers the timbre of desire we weren’t willing to hide while dreaming. I wish you’d taken a second to look at me and said, You dreamt of me last night, didn’t you?”

“Learn to see what’s not always there to be seen and maybe then you’ll become someone.”

“We lead many lives, nurse more identities than we care to admit, are given all manner of names, when in fact one, and one only, is good enough.”

“It’s my secret private little hell. I live with it, I sleep with it. I love that no one knows. I wish you knew. Sometimes I fear you do.”

“I would sit on this very same spot in the years to come and remember that never in my life had I known the sort of loneliness that you can actually touch on your body.”

“They sat in the back, rigid and uncomfortable, like sisters of sin, like a living defiance of the drab sanctity of the saints.”

“She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead.”

“And John knew, in the moment his father’s eyes swept over him, that he hated John because John was not lying on the sofa where Roy lay.”

“He heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicate and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness.”

“In her white dress she was like a cold light coming into the room.”

“The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build.”

“Monotonous? Well, maybe also monotonous: they fight and fight, they fight now, and fought before, and fought afterwards - you’ll agree it’s even all too monotonous. In short anything can be said about world history, anything that might just enter the head of the most disturbed imagination. Only one thing cannot be said - that it is sensible. You’d choke on the first word.”

“… as it turns out, there isn’t even anyone to be angry with; that there is no object to be found, and maybe never will be; that it’s all a slight-of-hand, a stacked deck, a cheat, that it’s all just slops - nobody knows what and nobody knows who, but in spite of all the uncertainties and stacked decks, it still hurts, and the more uncertain you are, the more it hurts!”

“I love most fondly - I love madly - I love as a man who would give his life-blood to save her a tear”

“I have but one promise and but one heart to give; that promise is pledged to you, and that heart is also yours.”

“For as long as I lived, I would travel far and wide, meeting with people who’s languages I did or did not know, and everywhere I went, I would be looking for Maria Puder. In every pair of eyes, I would be searching for the Madonna in a Fur Coat.”

“Every day, every hour, was full, even when I was asleep. It was not just my tired limbs that were coming to life. It was also my soul, revealing to me the sublime vista it had kept buried for so long. Maria Puder had taught me I had a soul.”

“What does he live for? What does he find in life? What logic compels him to keep breathing? What philosophy drives him as he wanders the earth? But we ask in vain if we fail to look beyond the surface - if we forget that beneath each surface lurks another realm, in which a caged mind whirls alone.”

“The peak of Monte Cristo, reddened by the burning sun, was seen across the azure sky.”

“The worst part of it was I couldn’t come straight out and tell him what I thought of him, because he caught TB before I could do that, and now I had to humor him along till he got well again and could take the unvarnished truth.”

“Joy takes a strange effect at times - it seems to oppress us almost the same as sorrow.”

“How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange.”

“Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.”

“She puts her hand to his chest, where she feels his heart tap against her palm, over and over, over and over, as if asking the same question and getting no answer.”