ALEC S > Recent Status Updates

“What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”

“If the distance is unbearable, she didn’t ask, then or in the two days she stayed with her parents, then why do you live so far from me?”

“He say slaves from Africy had wings, but white folk cut them off so they couldn’t fly home. When I was little , he say my mama fly away like that. Took me a while to know he mean she run off.”

“But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become - what kind of grief is that?”

“It’s a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.”

“That’s what people do. We can’t live each other’s lives, and we can’t see each other’s memories or feelings, so we try to find ways to share them with each other.”

“They take me every week. My whole family was killed in the name of God and now these people want me to sing a hymn like it was all some kind of misunderstanding.”

“I felt this gentle urgency around her, a bruised kindness, as if something had been threatening to destroy her every day of her life and her only defense, somehow, was to remain so torn open.”

“She did not hear him cross the courtyard beyond, nor see him pause in the arch-way that led from the subterranean path into the garden. He stood a minute, looking at her with new eyes, seeing what no one had ever seen before”

“I’ve got the key to my castle in the air; but whether I can unlock the door, remains to be seen”

“For love casts out fear, and gratitude conquers pride.”

“Logic is no doubt unshakable, but it can’t withstand a person who wants to live.”

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.”

“I love it, but I don’t see how you live there all alone.”
“I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Celebrated people.”

“Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

“You’ve undergone a total metamorphosis; you’ve always had such a keen grasp of things, has it deserted you now, of all times?”

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated”

“Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil.”

“I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because ‘Thou mayest.’”

“Was she very beautiful, Samuel?”
“To you she was because you built her. I don’t think you ever saw her-only your own creation”

“You have no love.”
“I had-enough to kill me.”

“It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.”

“I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener and well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape.”

“But she always had enough serenity to know that they were not memories of love or repentance, but the image of a sorrow that left a trail of tears on her cheek.”

“[his heart] revealed to him that he and this man, whom he had always considered his personal enemy, were victims of the same fate and shared the hazards of a common passion; they were two animals yoked together”