Isabella Grace > Recent Status Updates

"Love is not enough. We die and are put into the earth forever. We should insist while there is still time."

"We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars."

"Newness strutting around as if it were significant. / Irony, neatness, and rhyme pretending to be poetry. / I want to go back to the time after Michiko's death / when I cried every day among the trees. To the real. / To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive."

"I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can."

"How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite."

“In the West whose stories I had grown up consuming, so much depended on the cleansing power of righteous anger…it was never just an expression of ballsiness or rebellion or righteous anything. What the men who’d lived or dreamed up these stories understood was that the plausibility of such transgression depended on who the system being rebelled against was made to serve.”

“Again I am angry and again I understand my anger is worthless.”

“…it dawns on me that the immigrant class, which in one form or another describes (or will come to describe, in the looming, cataclysmic decades of the Anthropocene) most of the world, is segregated by many things, chief among them narrative. Some are afforded the privilege of an arrival story, a homecoming. Others, only departure after departure.”

“Is there distance great enough to be free of this? To be made clean?”

“I understand this is just how things are, ethical double-jointedness being a necessary requirement for the daily debasements of modern political life, and yet I still wonder how someone can maintain this particular facade and sleep at night.”

“In articles about atrocities committed by groups or nations that are not Western allies…The violence is named, as is its perpetrator. Why this sudden clarity becomes utter fog when the subject is an Arab child torn to shreds by shrapnel or a Black motorist shot dead in a traffic stop or an Indigenous activist beaten at a pipeline protest is a function of preemptive deference to power.”

“…there are only two major political parties in America and one of them just happens to be populated with the sort of people who muse about whether wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers.”

“What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this. Here, then, is an account of an ending.”

“This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.”

“The very history of the word ‘genocide’ meant as a mechanic of forewarning rather than some after-the-fact resolution, is littered with instances of the world’s most powerful governments going to whatever lengths they can to avoid its usage, because usage is attached to obligation. It was never intended to be enough to simply call something genocide: one is required to act.”

“Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that no existence is violated?”

“Rather, in the face of the otherness of my own pain, I am undone, before her, and for her.”

“From men, I learned to praise the thickness of walls. / From women, / I learned to praise.”

“Turn back & find the book I left / for us, filled / with all the colors of the sky / forgotten by gravediggers. / Use it. / Use it to prove how the stars / were always what we knew / they were: the exit wounds / of every / misfired word.”

“As if to look down / on the dead is to look up / at my own face. … If I close my eyes / I’m inside the piano again / & only. If I close my eyes / no one can hurt me.”

“Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once.”

“My mother said I could be anything / I wanted—but I chose to live.” (Thanksgiving 2006)

"...to feel love for the nation, whereby love is an investment that should be returned (you are the 'taxpayer'), is also to be injured by these others, who are 'taking' what is 'yours'."

“…but i needed that first night to be alone. i needed to be alone so that he could come back.”

“because here the sun is shining silently, far from that unbearable and indeterminate thing. because here i am barely a person, and nobody knows about who i was. in a place belonging to me and me alone, so over abundant with life that it’s functionally nothing, happily indifferent to me except where it demands to be touched.”

owning line got me like 😭 “she was born for (and was always seeking) a world of immense gentleness.”