Alena > Recent Status Updates

Where I come from, that's adulthood. The rock-solid belief you're living the fate you earned.
Richer, happier people believed this too, I'd come to understand from life on this campus. The deserving of good fortune ... the sense that having money was proof of their industry and cleverness.

Because happiness is there for the taking, and so is grief, tenderness, hope, the wonder of lakes and mountains. Reach into that bottomless music box and pull out whatever medicine your day is wanting. The composers have written scripts for every need.

A child can't hate her mother without putting the load-bearing walls of the known world at risk. I settled for hating her shoes.

...together they would makes sense of things, or else commit to the idea that there would be no making sense, that life was not meant to add up to any one round sum.

"And are you feeling waves of great bitterness at the lunatic machinery of mankind pulling you into its grim mechanisms in opposition to your wishes and against the common sense morals of Mother Nature?"
"Yes."

For as long as I could remember I had know that the members of my family were the only TRUE Mormons I had ever known.

Lee said, "Do me the favor of admitting it's a hard war to get behind."
"Sure, I'll go along with that. But we don't get to pick our wars Lee."
"No"
"The war they give you, that's your war."

It was better to fall from that great height than to hope my dad would intervene.

The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

Even from this distance, Smita could see the awful, irregular geometry of Meena's face as past and present, normalcy and deformity, beauty and monstrosity, collided.

Everywhere, in every country, women were abused, isolated, silenced, imprisoned, controlled, punished, and killed. Sometimes, it seemed to Smita, that the history of the world was written in female blood.

India wasn't country so much as an unstoppable force of nature. ... At this moment, India felt inexpressibly large - as well as small and provincial enough to choke her.

It was the time when witch hunters were hard at work with their nasty business, only now they were in search of communists, and those they considered to be anti-American. Actors, writers, musicians, university professors, politicians, and poets, all were targeted.

It was a time when the world had gone mad with hatred, and such madness could spread through the population when you least expected it to; it happened all the time.

She wanted to be surprised by life, to walk along dark streets and kiss someone as if her life depended upon it and dance all night, even if her feet ached in the morning, even if dancing was thought to be wicked and vain.

Flynn would never know now. He felt keenly the loss of something he had never had.
When he heard Big Ben chiming the four, he rose from the bench and left the daffodils behind to an afternoon unmolested by poetry.

I remember thinking, what chance do I have at anything vaguely resembling normality? She loved herself, everything about herself. I I loved that about her.

What we know isn't always in line with what we feel, or what we do.

Study
I'm beginning to suspect this life
is a study for another one,

research for a larger project
still taking shape. ...
...
Each day is a note I jot down
under the day before.

It made me realize how literature can join humans in the bonds of quiet intimacy the way that almost nothing else can.

Making friends with defeat is the very opposite of accepting it.

Flynn understood. Grief and love were inseparable bedfellows. It seemed as good a reason as any to avoid both.

More and more, reality felt like a room she could slip in and out of, its walls porous and suggestive.

What Calla wanted was the answer, vivid and true, but she could never understand that the answer often came from the unglamorous work of being wrong, over and over again.

Beside Myself...

With each breath, I'm pulling
myself together. Clinching
The threads. Oh little shadow,
Falling away from me,
Come back. Oh, self,
crayoned outside the frame,
come back, come back.

Those who came from happy families would never stand in the same reality as a person like her. ... For Samuel, goodness was a given, an abundance. For Vivi, goodness arrived in brief, glimmering bursts, always snatched away at the last moment.

Mrs Roy made at her mission to disabuse boys of their seemingly God-given sense of entitlement.

Is home the place where you were born? Or is it the place where we die? ...
We are seeds in one soil. And weeds in another. ...
We don't always choose where we call home. Sometimes it's others who decide. ...
What if there's no such things as home?

As time passes and stories fade, photos are the only things left speaking for people who are gone, saying simply, I was here.

She didn't correct him. He wouldn't understand. Selecting a path may look like free will, but she knew all too well that decisions weren't the same thing as choices.