MM Suarez > Recent Status Updates

"They were not men accustomed to such darkness. They were ordinary men—work-hard, weekend-warrior, get-up-and-go-to-church kind of men—and what they’d just seen, where they’d come from affected them so. Numbness and disbelief hollowed his insides, a fire trapped in his flesh with the truth of what they carried."

“Before an attack, there’d be evidence of prowling and illegal entries in the homes around the victim’s. Small, inexpensive, sometimes personal items would go missing. Incidents of hang-up phone calls rose sharply in the four- or five-block radius just before an attack. He was doing reconnaissance.”

“Empathy’s not standing over a hole looking down and saying you understand. Empathy is having been in that hole yourself.”

“If you commit murder and then vanish, what you leave behind isn’t just pain but absence, a supreme blankness that triumphs over everything else. The unidentified murderer is always twisting a doorknob behind a door that never opens. But his power evaporates the moment we know him.”

“There are men who hunt who do not take their greatest pleasure in the skill of the hunt, but rather in the moment of seeing the deer stumble and fall, or the ragged bird come rocketing down. From animal to man is a difference in degree, not in kind.”

"I’m envious, for example, of people obsessed with the Civil War, which brims with details but is contained. In my case, the monsters recede but never vanish. They are long dead and being born as I write. The first one, faceless and never caught, marked me at fourteen, and I’ve been turning my back on good times in search of answers ever since."

“Once you made the proper assumption, a lot of things fell into their proper place.”

"I found that a two-day drunk gives your mind a flavor of unreliability. Memory is shaky and dreams become mixed with reality. I began to wonder if I had imagined the body."

“She hated it, she absolutely despised it, when people looked at her like she was unhinged and told her she “needed help.” Such statements, as she heard them, seemed to discount her genuine needs: her need for a functioning water heater; her need not to be scammed and exploited; her need to keep her lights on, to keep her food from spoiling.”

“I began to sense where it had started. It had started in the camp. Boredom was the enemy. And all my traditional defenses against boredom had withered too rapidly.”

“Like extended-stay hotels, rooming houses were proliferating across the country, filling the vacuum created by the steady loss of affordable housing.”

“There were white figures inside, four in the car and maybe another three in the truck. Seemed like they practically glowed in the dark. When they got out I seen why.”😣

“He said there were always going to be people who had to stay poor in order to make others rich.”

“How simple things were for Henry! How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything was either right or wrong and there was no doubt which was which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if.”

“You’ll move if I say so,” Hap said. “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.”
“Only so long as he alive,” I said.😆

“They gave us the dregs of everything, including officers. Our lieutenants were mostly Southerners who’d washed out in some other post. Drunkards, yellow bellies, bigoted no-count crackers who couldn’t have led their way out of a one-room shack in broad daylight. Putting them over black troops was the Army’s way of punishing them.”

“Michelle desired nothing more than to be working—both for financial stability and for her sanity. But a lack of childcare remained an insurmountable barrier.”

“Georgia, among the most landlord-friendly states in the country, was one of only three that did not require property owners to guarantee the habitability of apartments they rented out.”

“I was a young girl surrounded by what, today, we would call predatory men.”
“Because I was.”

“I didn’t see how the evening could get worse, which is a testimony to the fact that I had no gift for prophecy—because, as I should have known by then, things can always get worse.”

"The problem of not knowing keeps the ghost unsettled in your heart.”

"A man on his way to the scaffold thinks of a multitude of things at once and Woodrow, for all that he had a skinful of his own tax-free whisky inside him, was no exception."

“It would be years before I would understand the lunacy of that equation: It wasn’t that I was drawn to older men. It was that a certain type of middle-aged creep was always going to be drawn to young girls like me.”

"The key to staying alive, as evidenced by nearly every survival tale, is the ability to fish."

“You and Mr. Stetson. How long has that been going on?”😰

“They were a brilliantly devised distorting lens that turned facts into monsters, yet left them looking like facts.”

“People, even grown-ups, were volatile objects, and no two reacted to a capricious God in quite the same fashion.”

“If in doubt, lie, he has sworn to himself. If in hell, lie. If I trust nobody—not even myself—if I am to be loyal only to the dead, lie.”

“We had all been taught to fill in the hole that men left, to be quiet about men behaving badly, to move on”

“I felt a deep sense of embarrassment about it. James was the one who had an affair, who walked out, but the shame had become mine. I had made it mine. I was an abandoned wife, a woman rejected by her husband, a woman who had failed to keep her family together.”😡