Alena > Recent Status Updates

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers into it… They are, ideally, places where nothing happens, and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens into another world… engrossing books are landscapes into which readers vanish. (Flight)

Her mother's passing has left an ache in her, a wrongness, as if a hand has pulled out the loops and ribbons of her innards, then stuffed them haphazardly back in.

God's scattered all the clean among the dirty. You and me and Joel, we're nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud horseshit. We're on our own.

We flew for an hour or so, until daylight fully buried itself into night and all the light sank back, except for the stars and a toenail clipping of moon, and the kites disappeared, black on blackness. That's when we let go and our trash, kites really soared – up and away, heavenward, like prayers, our hearts chasing after.

Not impossible, of course, that there are remnants of others here in this place, stray elements, traces of the people who walked this land before, come to inspect the new arrivals. What would stop them leaning over the living to feel the warmth of their sleeping breath, the longed-for tick-tick of blood along their veins, to observe the enviable flush of life in the redness of their lips, in the tint of their cheeks?

...because it was clear to him that, with a map, a person could never get lost. With a map, a person could always know where they were.

...and when Paps called her fragile, he sometimes meant for us to take extra-special care with her, and he sometimes meant that she was easily broken.

And so I came home with Tonino's wardrobe and began the slow transformation from an American into a man.

Our young man himself was overburdened with books, luggage, gin, fish oil, and doubt

It was often this way, what had actually happened and what she could imagine had happened being equally vivid. She would not just forget which was which but why it mattered to know.

the world had decided that to be fallible was to be weak, but we're all fallible. Joanne had let men like Jimmy set the terms, but the terms were false. He was just as scared as anybody else. Bravery is almost always a lie. Courage is all we have.

you have to have something on the line for it to be called character

He seemed willing to embrace anything. Was this because he was empty, a ravenous void, or because he was full?

Nines took firm hold of his wrist. He pressed his thumb into the blue artery. His hands were rough , but the fingers were long and elegant as though God had granted them for a life he had never lived.

He tried to judge how much to take to level himself out to be here, enjoying this moment, not running around inside his head like it was a house too many rooms, an anxious shut-in moving from window to window, fearing some vague bad news

It went like this, loving John McLeod. You did it against all your better judgment, and in that exact moment he starved the embers into submission, he had the skill to blow on them gently and ignite them again.

He has a feeling that the road was unspooling beneath him, but no matter how fast he ran, he was no further along.

I think the entire country now registers a kind of low-grade fever, a vague and inexpressible weariness brought on by the sheer trauma of the assault on our democracy. In the meantime, demagogues who trade in hate, fear, unbridled corruption and opportunism exploit our vulnerability by convincing us that we need to be afraid of each other.

We all have a moral obligation to one another, and we share a tied destiny. This calls to mind Isaiah's principle of equity and the promise of a better future for us. In Isaiah's vision an equitable society is a place where we can see each other, and our shared future more clearly and fully in the preciousness of our humanity.

It was impossible to look at the unforgiving beauty and not feel the hand of God, albeit a God that cares nothing for your comfort, a God who expected you to struggle if you were to endure.

It had taken him less than 10 minutes to pack up four years of his life. It had taken him a little longer to fold himself away, to hide all the bits of himself that had slowly been unfurling since he had arrived in the mainland.

Walking down the road, there's a taste of something darker in the air, of something that might fall and blow and change things.

I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be

The sea is better than a mother. You can love your mother, and she still might leave you. You can love or hate the sea, but it will always be there. Forever. The sea has been the center of her life. It has nurtured her and stolen from her, but it has never left.

"A life is a thing you have to start, Suzanna. No one else can start it for you."
I had crested time's peak, gone where my family went, stayed where they stayed, had accomplished these feats again and again, and still the counselor took my commitments as fearfulness, my will for laziness.

"You'll climb that hill later," my grandmother said when the phone rang. "For now we're climbing this one."

Her intention was nothing less than to save my life – the life I didn't have, rather than the life I did.

Tell them there are no parents. A person gives birth to themselves or they don't. Tell them they should try it.

Of all the ways of being lonely, hearing that life could have been otherwise is one and hearing the person beside you wish that it were is another.

It's the long, golden string of insincerity thar threads together the entire human race: a shared agreement between women to insist in endless conversation that this thing we spend our whole lives preparing for - this thing we were born for, is anywhere close to what we thought it would be.