MM Suarez > Recent Status Updates

"She supposes there are many different ways to love. Hate is much simpler."

"As Ghaffar crossed the Pakistan border, moved into the tribal zone, and then began traveling across the dry and wasted landscape of southern Afghanistan, he and his men looked little different from their greatgrandfathers, who had twice shattered British invasions in the nineteenth century."

"Sometimes we compound the lies we tell each other with lies we tell ourselves, denying that what we’re doing is lying, or denying that lying is bad, or denying that lying has consequences. Denying that facts are facts. Denying that truth has meaning."

"America was nothing if not cognitively dissonant. That’s the real hysteria, the national pretense that we’re not what we empirically are."

"Before she pulls on the fitted sheet, she drops to her knees—the most painful part of her job—to check under the bed. That is when she sees it."

"It is said that all the determinants of success, luck is the most important."

"Strength was returning to her. She must have strength for what she was to do. Not because she condoned. Because despite the sins, and his were heavy, love was changeless."

"He had seen only the grotesque vision of a drunken congressman, stained by a drug scandal and blundering about the Islamic world with a belly dancer in tow. “He was just a terribly egregious fellow,” he says. “I found Charlie to be repugnant.” As far as Hart was concerned, this was a man no true Muslim could tolerate."

"Man had destroyed man, not only in his body but in his soul. Man was no longer large enough to defy. He was a monotonous tick-tack in a cosmic assembly line. He had forgotten that Good was an absolute. He believed in evil and not evil, but he no longer had knowledge of Good."

"When you grow up realizing the only way to get out of the sh*thole is by using your brain, you respect brains."

"To her the most bitter cup was to be cut away from life. To lose this amber hair, this crimson mouth, this molten flesh; to receive in its place the cold ash of oblivion."

"He had no outward aspects of success but no inner properties of failure. He didn’t seem to care about anything."

"Cook is an exemplar of a quintessentially American spirit, which lies on the razor’s edge between optimism and delusion, between audacity and deceit, imagination and flimflammery."

"Before the men’s disbelieving eyes, a fissure formed at the prow of the Belgica and shot almost instantly to the clearing, running more or less parallel to the canal."😱

"It was October 2024, and Uhl seemed fine talking about the changes, and then suddenly he began to cry. “We lost our compassion for humanity,” he said. “We being America. We being a nation of immigrants that seem to be angry and hate everything.”

"Something was breaking in him. For a man as enamored with the open ocean as de Gerlache, to be at the helm of an icebound ship was to be robbed of purpose."

"The poverty scholars Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir refer to the kinds of nonstop interruptions of plans Silas experienced as a “bandwidth tax,” calculating that being poor reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going a full night without sleep. People preoccupied with poverty “have less mind to give to the rest of life,”

"A lifelong student of maritime history, de Gerlache knew this was how mutinies began: when a charismatic crew member commanded more loyalty than a ship’s leaders."

"You watch, we’ll all end up divvied up in districts based on our politics, just like The Hunger Games,” Lance said."

"In our short acquaintance with polar aborigines, we learned to discount civilized intelligence in exchange for the more useful perspective of the primitive,” Cook wrote. “If one must live in the Arctic, the sooner he reverts to habits of the wilderness folk, the better.”

"There’s no longer a shared noble purpose behind ‘We the people.’ Instead, people convince themselves that their liberty depends on taking a gun into Starbucks.”

"As the poet Anne Sexton wrote, “Pain engraves a deeper memory.”

"We have breaking news,” Anderson said. “The Edmund Fitzgerald is lost.”

"A shower of burning timber covered Poe. In his fear he sucked in a lungful of the toxic air. He felt himself beginning to lose consciousness and knew he had little time left to save himself."

"Sometimes cold reason wasn’t enough; sometimes you needed skin in the game. Being personally involved forced you to go the extra mile."

"Before you’ve done anything you think, This looks easy. Anyone can do it. It’s amazing how smart you are in your twenties."

"Poe was all for people bettering themselves – it was how the human race advanced – but snobbery wasn’t the way to do it."

"Sailors long ago named Superior’s last 100-mile stretch from Munising to Whitefish Point “the Shipwreck Coast” and “the Graveyard of the Great Lakes.” It alone has claimed two hundred ships, starting with the Invincible in 1816, and stolen thousands of lives."

"Rich men are never that bright when they’ve done something stupid. Their first thoughts invariably turn to covering it up.’"

"When Lightfoot sang, ’She was the pride of the American side,’ he nailed it, right there. She was the Big Fitz, the Mighty Fitz. And everyone knew her."