ALEC S > Recent Status Updates

“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.”

“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.”

“The law of gravity applies to memories too.”

“And in the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

“And the people listened, and their faces were quiet with listening. The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great, and the listeners became great through them.”

“And in the south he saw golden oranges hanging on the trees, the little golden oranges on the dark green trees; and guards with shotguns patrolling the lines so a man might not pick an orange for a thin child, oranges to be dumped if the price was low.”

“And now the group was welded to one thing, one unit, so that in the dark the eyes of the people were inward, and their minds played in other times, and their sadness was like rest, like sleep.”

“The stars went out, few by few, toward the west. And still the family stood about like dream walkers, their eyes focused panoramically, seeing no detail, but the whole dawn, the whole land, the whole texture of the country at once.”

“The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

“He asks if I’m still writing a book about him, and I lie, I say yes, and he knows it’s a lie, and I know it’s a lie, and it’s a lie that pleases him, and I wish for more lies, a hundred lies, a thousand beautiful lies, any ugliness that will nourish him.”

“Maybe the biggest fiction I want to create is that it all matters. It matters so much. It matters and matters.”

“Also, I don’t know if I love you.”
“Do you think love is some kind of lightening flash? Like it strikes you and then the reverberations just ring out forever?”

“Her voice had no weight to it, like feathers. It was neither gloomy nor absentminded, as might be expected of someone who was ill. But it wasn’t bright or lighthearted either. It was the quiet tone of a person who didn’t belong anywhere, someone who had passed into a border area between states of being.”

“Cowboys and Indians disappear, dying off or transforming themselves by tortuous degrees into something quite different. The originals are nearly gone and will soon be lost forever in the overwhelming crowd. Legendary enemies, their ghosts ride away together - buddies at last - into the mythic sunset of the West.”

“It seems to me possible, even probable, that many of the nonhuman undomesticated animals experience emotions unknown to us. What do the coyotes mean when they yodel at the moon? What are the dolphins trying so patiently to tell us?”

“The kiss lasted three seconds, maybe four, but it set everything else in motion. My life was a painting I’d been staring at upside down until that moment, that moment when Leila wandered in and flipped it right-side up for me. Just like that. Everything clicked into place, the picture came into clarity.”

“I guess, I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right?”

“You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.”

“Well, we fly through our days. We move from one decision to the next, only we’re not even aware they’re decisions. We treat our minds like crowns, these magnificent crowns on our magnificent autonomies. But our minds aren’t crowns. They’re clocks. It’s why we invest everything In our stories.”

“Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.”

“Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded.”

“Bearing that in mind, the question which remains to us is this: what is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?”