Daniel Montague > Recent Status Updates

You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some wooly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green... Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.

"I think he had this little broken heart inside of him," says Martin. "I'm not a shrink, but there was something in his soul that was melancholy... And when you're around somebody, there's a difference between constantly jovial and a jovial angst. Some people are just born with a little melancholy."

Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power - a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome mortal foibles, grief and doubt.

He had never before seen a family at close quarters, and their oddities and quarrels and misunderstandings and loves and hates and imperfect sympathies and impossible yet inevitable togetherness fascinated him very much.

I had me a good man/
So sweet so strong/
Yes, lord he was a fine man/
But I treated him wrong/
I wanted a good time/
And I thought I could play/
Till a silver tongue devil led me astray/
Now my man is gone and my baby too/
I once had a rainbow/
Now all I have is blue

"We all use different tricks on ourselves, ways to get through the day. A lot of time I say Skinny cause it puts me out there, gives me some distance."

People who thought that Stella lived in hell were not wrong; but like all those who do not, they failed to understand that hell is a large place wherein there are familiar refuges and corners.

This was the story of our lives: minor insurrections; tiny victories; a brief chance to ridicule our oppressors; little floating vessels of hope amid a great sea of uncertainty, deprivation, and fear.

I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match it's weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one's own.

If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives. Falling might take just as long but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone

He had a wildebeest build, a head as bald and shiny as the chrome knob on a truck hitch, and a nose that looked like a gnarled chunk of pink charcoal. He shared with Beaufort the same ruddy complexion and near-handsome Neanderthal face. The kind of face where the brow is heavy, but with youth it looks serious. On the elder Brokamp, it only looked cruel, a concentration-camp guard quality to it.

The sky over the place you were born has a familiarity beyond how the clouds roll in or how the stars wink at you at night. The sky over your home behaves like that moment when, as a parachutist, you pull the rip cord and the heavens snatch you back . . . when you get that remembered glimpse of the fields and forests and rises and rivers of your home meeting the horizon, your jaw will tighten.

You only get one childhood, one chance at formation, and Stacey would carry those lessons with her long after she'd ruled their conclusions bogus. Such lessons came conjoined at the heart, Siamese twins, to the dizzying sensation that settles in when a person of faith comes to understand that, after all this, it's logical that only darkness awaits.

It was really all he'd discovered from his travels: No matter where you wen or how novel it seemed when you first pulled into town, it always turned into the same bars, same food, same women, same politics, same liquor, same drugs, same troubles.

It appears this is going to be an uplifting read. 😄

I could see, in spite of the absolute selfishness upon which it was based, that there was reason and common sense in it. I began to analyse my own motives, and found that they, too, were very largely mixed with selfishness. Was it more a desire to help those I considered my people, or more a desire to distinguish myself, which which was leading me back to the United States?

There was one man, a minstrel, who, whenever he responded to a request to "do something," never essayed anything below a reading from Shakespeare . . . Here was a man who made people laugh at the size of his mouth, while he carried in his heart a burning ambition to be a tragedian; and so after all he did play a part in a tragedy.

Wisdom itself is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality, but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

"You are not. You're alive, Bod. That means that you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.

Scarlett put her hands into the pocket of her anorak and walked down the hill without saying good-bye, convinced that Bod was holding out on her, and at the same time suspecting that she was being unfair, which made her angrier.

Beyond pity, grief, and secret fascination, almost everyone at the party discovered the same private truth: Lewis and Wren's situation made them feel better about themselves. Afterword, as those in attendance sifted through their own junk drawer of troubles, they would thank the tilted universe it wasn't their change to bear ... their life and family broken and rearranged.

If reading it would be painful to her, writing it had sometimes been unbearable to him. For in order to face her, he had to face himself.

"We need to eliminate all threats as soon as we see them. Every single one. No sitting around thinking about pros and cons. No worrying about diplomacy or legalities. No asking ourselves if something is proportional or allowed under this convention or that treaty. If we see something we don't like, we it immediately. Period."

It was hard to run a really effective fund-raiser after you'd been accused of statutory rape.

What was this halcyon timeframe when that was valid? 2007, when the housing bubble burst and the financial markets collapse.

She was creating things, Cassie realized, creating by remembering and by being; all of reality was changing. Cassie's memories and pain, her despair and her joy, her escape and her fear, made the unreality tremble and shake. All of these emotions, all of these memories, the building blocks of personality and humanity, were too much for Cassie's consciousness to contain.

I hope Cassie develops a personality soon.

As if leaving New York, she was also traveling away from the person she'd been there. Unconsciously, slipping back into the voice and attitudes of who'd she been before. A scrawny Georgia kid who thought it was a laugh to go skinny dipping with the boys

Kind of hard to get a feel yet, they keep introducing characters and perspectives. It is okay, but I am not yet invested in any of the characters.

Every now and then he tried to hurt me and he succeeded because he was really hurting himself, and I can't bear to watch him hurting himself.

Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from the actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

"I ate a jester once...he tasted funny.". 🤣