Kaylee > Recent Status Updates

“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all. You think being president is hard? Ha. Don’t you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough. “

“hey gay and dissipated life had left too few traces of its pleasure on her face”

i love the way rooney uses different writing styles to create more dimension in the characters, however i hate that i prefer the writing style for Peter’s chapters. it suits my short attention span smh

You want to push them further in, so they can feel everything the author tried so hard to create for them”.

That’s what I’d want to know. I think you could get some really original ideas that way, not the old regurgitated ones like man versus nature. Just shoot me if I ever assign anyone an essay about man versus nature. Questions like that are designed to pull you completely out of the story. Why would you want to pull kids out of the story?

“I would want kids to talk and write about how the book makes them feel, what it reminded them of, if it changed their thoughts about anything. I’d have them keep a journal and have them freewrite after they read each assignment. What did this make you think about?

“The biggest threat to men’s health, statistically, is heart disease,” Ted says thoughtfully at the kitchen table. “Do you know what the biggest threat to women’s health is?”
“Men,” Louisa says, because all women know that.”

“I mean, how could the devil be the dream?

it’s my birthday, i’ll DNF if i want to -

well chapter 1 hurt like hell

“Or, if you get caught doing something wrong,’ Arthur continued, ‘always say you didn’t do it, because you can always change your answer later – but if you admit it straight away, you’re stuck with that.”
may my child be this wise at 7

“People are always telling me what I’m like. Why is that?’ she asked, turning towards him. ‘I suppose everyone knows my story, so I’ve probably always battled against that. Others know more about me than I know about them; and I have to fight to make them accept my version of myself.

“Her mother had taught her about the value of an act of love every day, and had lived it too. But Marie-Thérèse could do all that stuff and feel no pulse of love in it, purely the mechanics of making the other person happy because things were easier that way.”

the sweetest, saddest passage

“this discrepancy between feelings spoken and feelings felt gives him the sensation of not existing at all.”

“their beauty doesn’t come from their goodness, you didn’t ask if progress is good, and a person is not beautiful because they’re good, they’re beautiful bc they’re alive, like a child. Alive and curious and restless. Never mind good. They’re beautiful bc there’s a light in their eyes. smt destructive, smt hurtful, smt selfish, but beautiful bc alive. and progress is like that, by its nature alive”

“ In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening”

“If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”
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dis makes me want to bomit

“If a person truly has the ability to love, then he can never monopolize his beloved. And neither can his beloved monopolize him. The more he spreads his love, the more he adores his one and only true love. When love spreads, it does not diminish.”

… was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with wgat now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more.”

“.. he and his wife had built things that had flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly and this- he now saw- ..

“…The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing”

“You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis…”

“He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.”

“What I mean is, I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it,” Orkideh said. “I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.”

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“It feels so American to discount dreams because they’re not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.”

“… And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?”

“Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble?..”

“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”