Laura > Recent Status Updates

“Give a man a car of his own and he leave humility and common sense behind him in the garage.”

“… travelled without labels in the guard’s van of the social express, and soon became lost luggage, destined, when the divorce had come and gone, to remain unclaimed on the dusty shelf of yesterday’s news.” 3/3

“… But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equipment them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation. And so Smiley, without school, parents, regiment, or trade, without wealth or poverty,…” 2/

“Was he rich or poor, peasant or priest?where had she got him from? The incongruity of the match was emphasized by Lady Ann’s undoubted beauty, its mystery stimulated by the disproportion between the man and his bride….” 1/

“It’s art that helps me cope. Because art is a fragile magic, just like love, and that’s humanity’s only defense against death. That we create and paint and dance and fall in love, that’s our rebellion against eternity. Everything beautiful is a shield. Vincent van Gogh wrote: ‘I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.’”

“Art is what can’t fit inside a person. The things that bubble over.”

“He’s thought so many times as an adult that it’s a lie that people are scared of being alone, because what we fear is being abandoned. You can choose to be alone, but no one chooses to be left.”

“You can be whatever you want in life, as long as you don’t become a critic! Not of other people, and not of yourself. It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that. But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.”

“You’ll realize that you’ve always been able to speak a secret language, one that has no boundaries, because you have no nationality. Art is your homeland.” 2/2

“You feel strange because you still have your wings, rubbing beneath your skin. You think you’re alone, but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’ And then you won’t feel lost anymore. 1/

“Art is coincidence, love is chaos.”

“The artist was an observer, he couldn’t bear to be observed, the world always gets those mixed up.”

“A lack of self-confidence is a devastating virus. There’s no cure.” 2/2

“Jose just wanted him to finish it, and the problem was that Joar thought you needed to start if you were ever going to finish, but that wasn’t how it worked. Art isn’t chronological. Everything the artist drew came from a place in his head that he could only get to if he wasn’t looking for it. If he was told to draw, it was like waking from a dream and trying to dream again.” 1/

“Imagination is the only thing that stops us from thinking about death every second. And when we *aren’t* thinking? Oh, those are all our very best moments, when we’re wasting our lives. It’s an act of magnificent rebellion to do meaningless things…”

… all the rich people at the auction keep saying to each other: “Did you know this is an old church?” Because rich people love reminding each other about how incredibly rich they are, so rich that they can buy things from God.

“Thank God for girlfriends. In this crazy, chaotic, divided world that was run by men, you could count on the women.”

“Words were creators of worlds; you had to be careful with them.”

“The Christian religion has sought to achieve its own innocence rather than act in solidarity with suffering and sinners.”

“… each of which was more interested in their own righteousness than the previous group. Revolutions took the place of evolutions, in which both order and disorder are allowed to work together. This is not a good way to move forward.” 2/2

“Without prophets, we have settled for violent revolutions and righteous reformations in just about every century. Societies have had no mechanism for reforming from within, and so our histories became about ferreting out heretics, imprisoning and murdering would-be rebels, and protecting shifting, angry, dualistic, and ambitious in-groups, …” 1/

“If one knows hell as home, then is returning to hell a homecoming? Even in hell, were there such a place, one would know where the fires were just a little cooler, where the rocks were just a little less jagged.”

“White people often spent time admiring their survival of one thing or another. I imagined it was because so often they had no need to survive, but only to live.”

“‘Yes, but them people liked it, Jim. Did you see their faces? They had to know them was lies, but they wanted to believe. What do you make of that?’

“‘Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.’”