Lily Pendleton > Recent Status Updates

‘what happened? I know that face’
I want to say something
pero my mind is LOCKED.
I tell Ms. Lori
I'm fine when I'm not.

I have found it absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be. Things nobody ever warned me about. I wish someone had said to me earlier ‘Sybil, over and over again serpents will emerge from the bottom of the sea and grab you by the feet’.

I remember always finding it odd, the way people had of speaking around and around a thing rather than directly to the thing, and I was often punished for insolence and rudeness.

It was like my mother was the makeup of his skeletal system. She died and the rest of him, the meat, the organs, the skin, sloughed into a pile. He was this way for about a year until he remarried. New bones, new skeleton.

“He learned the most important rule of survival: that feeling sorry for yourself didn’t work. When he sat alone in the darkness and cried and was done, nothing had changed.”

“And if that lord had a son, would he order him to be killed as well?” asked Isaac. “Time will tell.” “So the lord is capable of anything, of good, bad and worse?” “Yes, he is.”

“The best predictor of whether we are happy or not is our social relationships. It is the clearest and most recurring pattern I see when I look at the evidence of why some people are happier than others.”

“By doing a resilient thing, we felt more resilient. That circular process of being resilient and feeling resilient kept us afloat.”

“She apologized right to my face, and I accepted that… I need to learn not just to forget but to forgive. But the movement of time seemed not to be fixed properly. The bloody weight of desire and the rusty anchor of remorse were blocking its normal flow.”

“I started to build a new kind of person: one who was rude sometimes and who didn’t always do the right thing, and whose big stupid heart made her endlessly seem to hurt, but also who deserved to be here, because she now had something to give.”

“Becoming a team didn’t mean the end of their arguments, but it did mean that the arguments became a part of the adventure. Became discussions not threats…. Feeling like a team is something that happens invisibly. You might call it caring, or even love.”

"There were two types of drinkers: those who drank to enhance their personalities, and those who sought to rid themselves of something... Kafuku could not tell what it was that he was trying to get rid of. Maybe weakness in his character, or trauma from his past. Or perhaps something in the present was causing his problem...Whatever it was, he was trying like mad to either forget it or numb the pain it caused."

Set in America 2035, a charismatic conservative president reigns after winning with the campaign slogan "Make America Great Again". I was expecting a continuation of Parable of the Sower, but it's much more about the mommy issues that stem from being the only non-prodigy child (and only daughter) of very successful prodigy mother. Shaping up to be another very timely read.

“she tried in every way she knew how to connect with me, and it was only that I never truly knew myself that kept us at bay.”

“It is really better to say frankly “I can’t imagine how it can be done” (which is a literal truth) than to confuse the mind with a picture of an enlarged man performing the impossible” God is not “ a harassed telephone operator answering callers at a switchboard of superhuman size”

“Those whose lives have been governed… from early childhood have never been allowed to develop their real selves. Forced to be “loving”, they have never actually learned how to love.” pg 29