MM Suarez > Recent Status Updates

"All great fortunes were built on the backs of misery."

"Albright didn’t just fall down the stairs, he was launched. He landed with a sickening thud six or seven steps below."

"After a certain age, nothing ever gets better, not really. It’s just different speeds of getting worse and, ultimately, futile. No one gets out alive."

"Ivanov had used one of these dinners to spray his American opposite number with an odorless, colorless dust marked with a special chemical tag. The KGB would then screen the belongings and clothes of Soviet diplomats for traces of the tag, and anyone who came back positive would be suspected of traitorous contact with the CIA."😖

"Saying goodbye was a wretched thing in prison and no one enjoyed it, so it was mostly avoided at all cost. Saying goodbye drove home the point that everyone else was staying put in the worst place anyone could imagine."

"Why did the KGB stick so doggedly to a system that no longer seemed worth the enormous time and effort it demanded? Partly, the institutional memory of the successes during the early Soviet period and the roots in the Bolshevik underground kept the organization wedded to illegal work as a key part of its internal mythology."

"Plumbers, now those were the real criminals. Fifty bucks minimum just to walk in the door."☺

"Yuri also needed to internalize one important piece of advice: never be cleverer than your legend."

"Iosif grimaced at the strict rules of the new KGB. “We used to be romantics…. Now you’re all such pragmatists,” he said wistfully."

"There was nothing to gain in thinking about the past and I avoided it at all costs. The future for me never covered much ground."

"It was a curious feature of the purges that for all their grotesque lawlessness there was an obsession with formal paper trails to retain the appearance of due process."

"The pistol slipped from Frye’s grip, and he looked down at his chest, gently placing both hands on his shirt."😮

"I knew how to hunt, so I had no problem hunting in the jungle. But I knew something else that my white buddies didn’t know: I knew what it meant to be hunted.” He turned and looked at Winston. “I still know what it means to be hunted. All these years later, we’re still being hunted.”

"The last of my hope was slipping away. It felt like a coarse rope sliding through my clenched hands. Burning."

"Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Don’t ever be sorry. You needed me, and I came. I’ll always come when you need me.”😭

"Something terrible happened to her. I can feel it in my bones."

"she thought vaguely but powerfully of time and change and tragedy and life and all the ways we hang on to these things, store them, and then take them out over the years to leaf through the memories in their pages."

"I’d always been interested in art but had found out relatively quickly I valued more how it made me feel versus knowing its origin and mechanics. I think that’s true for most good things—if you try too hard to understand them, you kill what makes them special in the first place."

"Rain is good luck on your wedding day because a wet knot is so much harder to untie."🙄

"She told me the very best way to calm myself was to empty my mind. To not think of anything. It would be the most difficult thing I would ever learn in therapy because the mind isn’t a naturally quiet place. It’s a street corner in the busiest city in the world.

"I held my lowest opinion for independent voters who, after decades of empirical evidence, still couldn’t see the high-contrast differences between the two parties, or who fatalistically thought it didn’t matter whom we elected anyway."

"Do I shoot her right away? Do I let her get in the car and see it is me and then, boom, boom, boom, end it immediately?"😵

"The only lonelier fate than rejection was never exposing yourself to its possibility."

"A first sleepover, whether it was sexual or platonic, had a way of making you both more and less comfortable around the other person; you’d jumped a fence of intimacy, but now you saw each other in the blunt morning light."

"if you are deluded and narcissistic enough to believe you should obey your gut rather than looking coldly at the facts, that’s your bias, not your gut.”

"In the quiet, it was easy to push away and bottle up. In a storm of chaos, it was sometimes easier for Wilde to put himself in the eye and see the obvious."

"Given my black face and upbringing it was easy for me to flee into the anonymity of blackness, yet I felt frustrated to live in a world that considers the color of your face an immediate political statement whether you like it or not."

"I don’t even get the concept. Reality TV? I watch TV to escape reality."😊

"The way Tateh treated her, they’d call her an “abused woman” today. Back then they just called you “wife.” And a man could do anything he wanted to his wife in the South. Especially if she’s a Jew who’s crippled and he’s a so-called rabbi."

“If it fits their narrative,” Chris said, “people buy anything. We all know this.”