Eric Hinkle > Recent Status Updates

"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."

"How much value was there in a love that didn't seek the eternal?"

"And in the time between dying and death, a little Alaska sat with her mother in silence."

"... seemingly there is nothing left but quietism -- robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it."

"All you can do in this life is follow your dreams. Otherwise you're just wasting your time."

"Your mother was still looking silently at the orange. And all the orange trees your father had abandoned to the Jews shone in his eyes, all the well-tended orange trees that he had bought one by one were printed on his face and reflected in his tears..."

"We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it."

"If we're better than any other human society, then we ought to be helping them."

"Sometimes [Stephanie, our youngest] seems not to recognize us in public. She feels about kindergarten the way people used to feel about going away to college: at least she is out of the house, out of her parents' control, on her own in the great world. I think she has an irrational faith that she won't always be two years younger than Lizzie."

"Once more they gave up trying to talk reasonably; once more they sighed simultaneous but unsympathetic sighs; once more each resolved to stare only at the unrolling highway."

"'Tell my why, WHY do the Christians hate us the way they do? They seem so nice when I can look at them without my star.'

'... The Christians say they love [Jesus, a Jew]. But I think they hate him without knowing it. So they take the cross by the other end and make a sword out of it and strike us with it!'"

"He got up to look for something to drink. Sometimes there were a few drops left at the bottom of yesterday's bottle, sometimes not. It was too early to go to the shop. It was too early to be alive, so he just walked from wall to wall, dying."

"As with all disasters, the only thing that can make one forget a massacre is an even bigger massacre, and we're a people whose fate it is to be forgotten as a result of its accumulated calamities."

"There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair."

"I had a sort of invisible reek of sadness and low self-esteem that kept people far away, like a sulfuric stink cloud that I emitted into the air around me."

"The ways to be unwanted were inexhaustible, it seemed, and as a child I still had no clue how to claim a spot for myself in the world."

"I was a drip of paint dropped onto a foundation on the shady side between two worlds, where the sun barely touches. I was drying slowly."