Catherine > Recent Status Updates

“She remembered her younger self, who had always asked, ‘what if I had never come here?’ Now she knew the answer: It didn’t matter because she had come here. Her life had happened the way that it did, whether for a million reasons or for a few. That’s all she needed to know.”

“But it sounds as though she needs books she can stretch towards, as well as books that are comfortable” (130)

“The trick of life, as I see it now, is to make what’s around you beautiful. It’ll grow from there. Took me a long time to see that.”

“Here everyone is, listening to them play those songs. Just for us. And it’s only right now. Right this second. Soon, the moment will be over and done forever. Everyone will go home, and the band will move on to the next city. But right now, we’re here, and it’s happening.”

“Saturday begins like a Rilo Kiley song, twinkling and sunbathed.”

“Bad things sometimes happen to good sentences. What can you do?”

“It is like all good independent bookstores should be, owned and staffed by people who love books, read them, think about them, and sell them to other people who feel the same way…. It’s really a paradise on earth, if paradise for you smells of paper and paste.”

“Kennedy hadn’t considered it before, that to write something beautiful you just do it regular, and then you pull out a red pen.”

“Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.”

“Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.”

“My mother was not just an idea. She was made of a body, and a body is not simple or plain. It has its own will and its own mysteries. When it gives up, no song, no prayer can bring it back.”

“I just people two ways—on how they treat animals, and on what they like to eat. If their favorite food is some kind of salad, they are definitely a bad person. Anything with cheese, they are probably OK.”

“From a distance this crowded, flawed city looked like magic. Up close, I’d see later, it can be a big old mess. CHER Horowitz’s ‘full-on Monet’ comes to mind.”

“To go to Tulum today means immersion in a Western subculture that has become widespread but that no one has yet given a proper name to, composed of some combination of hippie and hipster and yogi and foodie and burner, people eager to spend perverse amounts of money in the pursuit of low-key cool.”

“The infinity pool erases—visually at least—the demarcation between nature and civilization. It gives us the illusion of the sublime, without the part where we confront the terror inherent in nature.”

“Not to mention, reality TV arguably does have value. In this very book, we’ve toured the genre like a museum, examining the things that they do for us and the various facets of our culture that they reveal.”

“It is perhaps a fool’s errand to ask Beyonce to accent your show if you want it to remain your show.”

“When I am not from a place, I am often a dead giveaway. I take pictures of everything. I read local newspapers with a look of delighted confusion on my face. I sometimes forget to turn off Google Maps, meaning that my phone sporadically offers a loud burst of driving directions from my pocket.”

“How I would wait on Napster while download progress on his albums ticked off about one percent every thirty minutes.”

“A people cannot only see themselves suffering, lest they believe themselves only worthy of pain, or only celebrated when that pain is overcome. Cornelius had a vision for Black people that was about movement on their own time, for their own purpose, and not in response to what a country might do for, or to, them.”

“Art is paradox. It is no sense but it is sense” (49).

“Memory, for me, is often a home where the furniture has been rearranged one too many times.”

“Because so many of the poems
felt a little like our own stories.
Like we saw and were seen.
And how crazy would it be
if I did that for someone else?”

“There’s not only Du Bois’s warring double consciousness. Or the dual personality James Weldon Johnson described, where we perform in the same generic style each race demands. There’s a space in our consciousness where all this racialized material collects, never static, mutating or at least recombining.

How many times could we write our cultural life stories? How many selves would tell them?”

“It occurs to me now that this was the real joy of dancing: to enter a world unlike the one you find yourself burdened with, and move your body toward nothing but a prayer that time might slow down.”

Finally getting around to one of the library books I checked out in February...

“How do I watch
every single one of my dreams
flutter like a ribbon of bubbles

pop pop popping in the air. I don’t.”

“I come from people / who are no longer alive.”

“Can you be from a place
you have never been?

You can find the island stamped all over me,
but what would the island find if I was there?

Can you claim a home that does not know you,
much less claim you as it’s own?”

“You do not let your words stunt unknown possibilities.”