Christina > Recent Status Updates

'Uncle Albert glanced over at me. "But as long as they gave us medals, that fixed it, as far as the army was concerned. You expect heroes to survive terrible things. If you give them a medal, then you don't ever have to ask why the terrible thing happened in the first place. Or try to fix it." He made a flicking gesture with his fingers. "How else are you gonna have heroes?"'

If you have ever tried to make conversation with a monarch, over the hog-tied body of an evil wizard, with a dead man in the next room, it is not easy. Talking about the weather didn't seem appropriate, and "So, do you think this will work, or are we all going to die?" didn't strike me as very good either.
"Think this'll work, or are we all going to die?" asked Spindle, who was not troubled by social niceties.

'People were staring now. Apparently a girl walking through the Elbow was unusual, but a girl with a madwoman riding a dead horse was perfectly acceptable. There was probably a moral lesson in there somewhere, but I had given up on moral lessons for today.'

'It was the strangest thing. Here she was marching to her almost certain death, and it was the first time in a long time that she felt her life mattered. This urgency, this rush—like all of her, body and soul, was pointed like an arrow, taut with purpose. Something better than anger, despair, or vengeance.'

Reminiscent of the ending of Albert Camus' L' etranger.

'Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. ... When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to other drivers, to the unwidowed.'

'Read at least one novel a month.'
Some of the best advise I've encountered.

'Indeed there were many parts of her plan she had not thought through. How to explain a reanimated corpse to the rest of the department. How to keep Grimes from screaming for help. How to convince a dissertation committee that the hoarsely blathering pile of rotted flesh and bones was in fact the soul of Professor Jacob Grimes speaking, and not a paid undergraduate hiding beneath the floorboards.'

'I have to get Aunt Tabitha. ... Not that Aunt Tabitha had bodies in her bakery on a regular basis, but she's one of those competent people who always know what to do. If a herd of ravenous centaurs descended on the city and went galloping through the streets, devouring small children and cats, Aunt Tabitha would calmly go about setting up barricades and manning crossbows as if she did it twice a week.'

'In her famous book about the human condition, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt expressed the ethics of doubt as follows: 'even if there is no truth, man can be truthful, and even if there is no reliable certainty, man can be reliable.' ...There is no certainty in a rapidly changing world, but that is exactly why we have to be reliable, so we create islands of order and coherence in a world that is running amok.'

Human beings cannot choose to ignore only unpleasant feelings. If you are numb to your momentary experience, you are numb to it all, the good and the bad. ...If you avoid painful feelings by avoiding the awareness of what is going on around you, what you end up with is being unaware of what is going on around you. ...Ignoring the present makes it difficult to learn what works in the new ways you are living your life.

'Reality shows are the most prevalent and brutal evidence of the sustaining, unrelenting power of stereotype and how people are so willing to act that stereotype out.'

'This would have been salvageable, if Professor Grimes were not on deadline for a conference presentation at the Royal Academy of Magick in London.
Alice and Peter were thus recruited to fill in the gaps. ... Who cared if it was unpaid overtime? Who cared if it meant thirty extra hours a week for which they would not be credited, at the same time that they were still burdened with coursework?'

'What I seek here is only to offer a way of looking at our lives that allows us the possibility of creating them in such a way that they become meaningful ... Or, to put it another way, I would like to develop a perspective within which to recognize ourselves and our lives so that between our living, our dying, and the increase of the land, something worthwhile will have a chance of taking place.'

'Barbara Kruger: ...No work, no painting, no novel, no movie is as brilliant and masterful or as failed and minor as it's thought to be. Things get pumped up, and that has to do with our value systems.'

'Yearning is not only for the past, for something that was. Yearning also means that there is something we do not like about the present. ... If the present has little to say for itself, or if we feel unable to shift our attention and we do not even know what the present has to offer, the more likely it is that yearning will persist.'

"I've never thought about texts like this before."
"What, in terms of close reading?"
"I just mean—I don't know, taking into account when they were written, and the author's social context, and such."
"Historicization, Murdoch. That's what we call it. What, do you just take everything you read at face value?"
"I mean, if the math checks out."
"Unbelievable," said Alice. "This is why everyone hates logicians."

'For Aristotle, the good life is not merely a state. One doesn't arrive at the good life. The telos of a human life is not an end result, where one becomes something and then spends the rest of one's life in that condition that one becomes. ... It is, instead, active and engaged with the world. It is an ongoing expression of who one is.'

Twyla Tharp: "Editing means, how much objectivity do you have really? How much can you disassociate from your own bias? How much can you disassociate yourself from the wish fulfillment component that is involved in work of all sorts? You've got to become not you."

'I worry that people will describe themselves with the term complicated grief because they believe that the depth of their grief cannot be normal, and the fact that the undertow of grief persists cannot be normal. But this is a common concern—grieving does take time, and restoring a meaningful life takes time, in the most normal and natural cases.'

'As I moved between artists, I heard this sentiment over and over—deep down, you had to believe you could make the work that eluded you, otherwise you couldn't work.'

"Hell's lonely," said Peter. "You'll want company."
"Hell is other people, I've heard."

'That was all there was to say about it, but Kitty stayed, hands to knees, looking at the wall in the dark of the room that had been her room three lifetimes ago. Sabine waited to see if there were something else. You never knew with these people, there was always some revelation lurking around the corner of every meaningful silence.'

'If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrow tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need.'

'The increase in interest rates will slow aggregate demand, affecting consumption, investment, export, and import spending. The slowdown in aggregate demand ... will result in a lower inflation rate.
    Sounds straightforward, yes? Alas, no. There are many caveats to this seemingly straightforward argument. After all, it is economics!'

'How is money created? If you just said to yourself, "Oh, I know this one! They print it!," then I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but no. The printing press is a great visual, but it is not the focal point of money creation. New currency is printed primarily to replace old dirty bills, not to increase the total amount of money in the economy.'

'Decent mothers don't send their sons to some children's prison for being homosexual." Before Parsifal's death, Sabine's mother had always dropped her voice on the word homosexual, but now that she saw it as the source of his persecution, she spoke it clearly; even, Sabine, thought, loudly.'

'The wait at the luggage carousel seemed endless. Bags flipped down the silver chute as the crowd pressed forward, everyone ready to be the next winner. No one ever knew what to say while they waited for their bags. "How was your flight?" Sabine asked.'

'Jasper started to talk, and it was like when he prayed at dinner that night, just platitudes, like a computer program had written them based on phrases in the Bible and Constitution mixed together.'

'"Lillian's tough," Roland said proudly.
"She's the toughest person I know," Madison replied. "But I wish she didn't have to be so tough all the time."'

'Be vicious, be loved, and be lucky, read the words Alex had chiseled over the mansion he built on what used to be Clayborn Street, and largely, they were.'