Eric Hinkle > Recent Status Updates

"Disliking me is so easy that I think my parents appreciate me for allowing them to do it with no effort."

"They controlled men by habit, ruse, fear, and weaponry [...] They prevented men from doing anything. But they did nothing themselves. They did not rule, they only blighted."

"She knew the truth now: she would have to meet these monsters on her own."

This and the previous quote are in reference to the day her peers discovered she was gay.

"Since that day, it seemed to Mia that everything had changed. She felt as if she was naked and the world was watching her. From now on, she would live without armour, vulnerable, deserted. Like a child in a fairy tale, she would move through a cold, dark, mist-wreathed forest. And who knew if she would meet a bear, or a wolf, if she would sleep in a gingerbread house where a witch would try to roast her in an oven."

"At that moment, hers was the face of one engaged in the noblest of battles, when we reach for what we dream of, throwing caution to the wind."

"Her bare feet were slightly stained from the leather sandals. The straps left halos around her ankles. Her toes were open and free. She made Japanese tea."

"If you approach your children the same way I approach mainstream music, which is either by avoiding it or swearing at it, then you're going to end up with pretty lousy children."

"I learned to accept her condition when I stopped searching for the mother I had known before. Genocide is an oil slick: those who don't drown in it are polluted for life."

"We might not live to see the day our country comes out of its darkness into light, but we'll forge forward believing, because there's no other way to live."

"But these Americans, with their abundance of knowledge, how could they be powerless too? How is it that their government, which is supposed to be their servant, is acting as their master?"

"How can they not see that they're doing to our children what other people could one day do to their children?"

"How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tormented -- reeducated -- before it begins to matter to the majority of Americans? How does this penning people up look to other countries?"

"He's had to distance himself from the worst of his followers. But he still knows how to rouse his rabble, how to reach out to poor people, and sic them on other poor people. How much of this nonsense does he believe, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to conquer and to rule?"

"Once he's made everyone who isn't like him sound evil, then he can blame them for problems he knows they didn't cause. That's easier than trying to fix the problems."

"To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well. It's unwise, though, to think you know how it's going to go, or how it's going to end. That's to be known only when it's over."

"You are like a cow who has eaten all the grass in her field. The butcher has come. He is at your doorstep. Go."

"A lot of folks think trees are simple things, incapable of doing anything interesting. But there's a tree for every purpose under heaven. Their chemistry is astonishing. Waxes, fats, sugars. Tannins, sterols, gums, and carotenoids. Resin acids, flavonoids, terpenes. Alkaloids, phenols, corky suberins. They're learning to make whatever can be made. And most of what they make we haven't even identified."

"You can replace forests with plantations. You can also arrange Beethoven's Ninth for solo kazoo. A suburban backyard has more diversity than a tree farm!"

"For the first time, as opposed to just sucking at everything and getting nothing from life except hate and failure, suddenly I'm getting positive reinforcement from something I'm doing. We all were."
-Tommy Stinson

"[Leaving Iowa] with the freedom to test all the flaws inherent in his own desire."

"The wealthy do not have to rush after ticking clocks; they simply glide through each day, dandling the hours in their hands, wearing them like elegant gloves. For the poor, however, time is mere rags, tattered scraps that are never enough, no matter how much you pull and tug at them, neither covering goose-pimpled flesh nor providing any warmth."

"'I have to go away.'
'What do you mean, away?' Away where?'
'I don't know yet. But far enough away from here. I can't live here anymore. Every day I struggle to keep from collapsing on the spot. Will you come with me? [...] I'm going, Miro. One way or another.'
'But what about us?'
'I'm not sure if there still is an us, Miro, and if there is, I don't want this us anymore. I want a new us.'

"I often used to wonder what would happen if the world's collective memory had retained different things and lost others. If we had forgotten all the wars and all those countless kings, rulers, leaders, and mercenaries, and the only people to be read about in books were those who had built a house with their own hands, planted a garden, discovered a giraffe, described a cloud, praised the nape of a woman's neck."

"Happiness was mere survival."

Funny, that's how I feel at work these days.

"...[literature is] the anchor in the black lake of life."

"Only eight months after the revolution, a leadership profile had established itself that would lead inevitably to civil war: the concentration of power in the hands of a few leaders, the pursuit of economic and information monopolies, and discrimination against certain sections of the population."

"If our response is hatred too, then we are no better than them. Hate turns you ugly. Until it might become hard to tell what made your own violence more acceptable than your enemy's. And then, when it was all over, what would you have become?"

"My uncle Khosrove, himself a man of furious energy and uncommon sadness, had for a friend one year a small man from the old country who was as still as a rock inwardly, whose sadness was expressed by brushing a speck of dust from his knee and never speaking."
A sentence that speaks a heckuva lot.

"Her hair was one long grey braid down her back, woven and strung with the vertebrae of salamanders. She was barefoot, and her feet were furred and long. Her ears were furred too, squirrel-small and silver."

"Once you've tasted pure, unadulterated love, it's like a part of your heart has been irradiated, burned out, in a sense. Particularly when that love, for whatever reason, is suddenly severed... That sort of love is both the supreme happiness and a curse."