Alli Baker > Recent Status Updates

of these things had been stored away for her to pass along someday, relics to be carried up the branches of the family tree. But the family tree stopped growing long ago, its canopy thinned and frayed, not a single sap springing from the old rotting trunk. Some trees aren't meant to sprout tender new branches, but to stand stoically on the forest floor, silently decaying.

“Is this what passes for a pickup line in your thirties? Complaining about back pain?”

“Thumping bass pulses from the kitchen, some song Cameron has heard a million times but couldn't name. Is this part of being in your thirties? Out of touch with the music kids like?”

“feeling yet again like an intruder spying on the typical human experience, an outsider looking in on the normal.”

“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see? And Ash only saw the Nora he had fallen in love with and married, and so, in a way, that was the Nora she was becoming.”

“To be apart of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.”

“She had thought, in her nocturnal & suicidal hours,that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature, solitude took in a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself, herself & the world.

“The art of swimming — she supposed like any art — was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing. “
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