Nicole > Recent Status Updates

“The air I’m breathing is the same air your ancestors breathed. Even what is in my body right now—the cells, the air, the bacteria— it’s not only mine. It is a point of connection with every other living thing, made up of the same kinds of particles, ruled by the same physical laws.”

“As human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a body. But our atoms were many things before, and they will be many things after.“

“To look up at the night time sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.”

“A new voice is pushing itself out of my writing, full of the closeness to feel to death. The awareness of my own mortality, so finely threaded, so acute. A new urgency, an impermanence in the air. I must write everything now, because who knows how long I have?”

“I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal. Grief telling you it is over, and your heart saying it is not. Grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present. It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed.“

“It is not so much about what my father says, as it is about being with him. A laugh that I will never laugh again. Never has come to stay. Never feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”

“The weight is heaviest in the mornings, post sleep. A leaden heart, a stubborn reality that refuses to budge: I will never see my father again. Never again. It feels as if I wake up only to sink and sink. In those moments, I am sure that I do not ever want to face the world again.”

“Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say ‘This is what you will never again have’. Sometimes they bring laughter, but laughter like glowing coals that soon burst aflame in pain.”

“the smug certainties of a person yet unaquainted with grief. I have mourned in the past, but only now have I touched grief’s core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am at the center of its churning.”

"I am afraid of going to bed and of waking up; afraid of tomorrow and of all the tomorrows after. I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual… how is it that the world keeps going breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?”

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language”.

“Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue?”

“That first great loss, like a first love, I suppose, that prompts the questioning. Maybe, once you come to realize that there are no answers, you learn to live with the questions.”

“All we needed was to be returned to the wild.”

“Noemí, just because there are no ghosts it doesn’t mean you can’t be haunted. Nor that you shouldn’t fear the haunting.”

“If you don’t open yourself up, how can you ever be surprised by life? And if you’re not surprised, what’s the bloody point?”

“All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere?”

“I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon, it was me.”

“The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you,” he said. “Professor Steinberg says this is Pygmalion. Think of the story, Tara.” He paused, his eyes fierce, his voice piercing. “She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”

“You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you, not in Cambridge, in you. You are gold.”

“To write my essay I had to read books differently, without giving myself over to either fear or adoration… there was a thrill in trusting myself to read the words. There were wonderful suppositions embedded in this method of reading. That books are not tricks and that I was not feeble.”

“I had been taught to read the words of men like Madison as a cast into which I ought to pour the plaster of my own mind to be reshaped according to the contours of their faultless model. I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself.”

“Since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected - a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality.”

“Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.”

“Maybe that was what madness was, the loneliness of understanding what others can’t.”

“‘Whenever you start doubting yourself,’ she said, turning back to the audience, ‘whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change—and change is what we're chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back. No more subscribing to others' opinions of what you can and cannot achieve. And no more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you’.

“I don’t think it’s normal.”

“Maybe not,” he agreed. “But I’m not sure what normal is. Does science recognize normal? How would you define normal?”

“Well,” she said. “I guess normal is a little like average.”

“I’m not so sure. Normal isn’t like weather; you can’t expect normal. You can’t even make normal. From what I can tell, normal may not exist.”

“Life’s a mystery isn’t it? People who try and plan it inevitably end up disappointed.”

“All true artists are outsiders.”

“The bike is one of the few items in this room besides my iMac and my books. Nothing up on the walls. No rugs on the floor. Partly because I like the whole minimal aesthetic. Partly because I still feel like I haven’t really moved in, because I like the idea that I could up and leave at any moment.”