manal > Recent Status Updates

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.”

“You know, I always tell my kids, I'm proud of you. You don't owe me anything. I'm proud of you. I sacrificed for you, yes, but you don't have to sacrifice for me.''

“There is no preparation for such a decision, I learned. No way to accept, with ease and grace, that you may never return home again. No way to explain that you could go home, but the cost is too terrifying a thing. No way to language a gaping wound that merely deepened each time I thought about it. Instead, in the car, I sobbed and I felt the weight of loss.”

“Maybe it’s a second generation thing: the gut-aching grief, the melancholic fury of living in a diaspora.”

“I tried to locate them within my carefully constructed maps of whiteness. Fingers moved gently, curiously, along the map, moving across mountainous terrains and white sandy islands, up and down coasts and across grand cities; there was nothing like Ren. I was looking at a map in search of a sun.”

“I'd wanted to believe that white womanhood could liberate me, deliver me into a world where a brown girl like me could feel wanted. That it could offer girls like Mom and me a chance at human dignity. But it couldn't. Shit, it couldn't even liberate white women.”

“To have loved and been loved so abundantly, so intimately and to have to leave it behind, with no plan for return. Would it be another decade before I felt their embrace? Would it be two? This place had changed me. Where there was love, there was now an accompanying ache—a deep yearning and longing to be with them.”

“To love and care for each other so openly, so vulnerably, so abundantly, felt commonplace here. I felt a growing deep reverence for the closeness my mother and her sisters had.”

“enamoured of the people and places alike. Home was an overflowing thing here.”

“The charm I saw in my father didn’t translate here, where there was often an undertone of hostility and suspicion.”

“We would do anything, even go against our natural instincts, so we could be taken care of.”

“I was starving and grateful. I felt such a pinching, thorny love for my mother. I wished I could hug her. But that would have been impossible. We never showed love in that way.”

“Our parents had left their homes and the thread had unraveled, then been women again with us. This was how it always was, an unraveling and a ravelling of the earth, the ground we stood on. Nothing was sacred, everything was sacred, everything changed, everything stayed the same.”

the concept of the psychiatrist not addressing the obsessive eating but kinda encouraging it (?)

“Things change with time. You don't have to overthink it beyond that point.” i think this is a questionable thing to say when talking about a relationship with beauty

i want to know what this medication is that the psychiatrist has prescribed and is increasing the dosage of even though she is claiming the author has more than just simple depression

this book is a lot more vulnerable than the last

“Do you think if you do that people's minds will change? Sure, they might be surprised at first. But do you think it would change how they feel about you? What are they going to say atter you make a point of how bad things were for you, 'Oh, how much you must've suffered? Is there really a difference whether you show them or not, in the end?”

i don’t know how i feel about the psychiatrist promoting appetite suppressants

“For now, I choose to be happy with a dream, rather than empty without one."

Isobelle simply stared at her, held by the force of Hilde's eyes.

"I must be content with a dream," Hilde whispered. "But your knight is real. Go to her."

“Oh, Gwen... what kind of dad would I be if I tried to stop you from being who you were born to be?"

"Why bring me here, do all this, only to give up? This isn't just your dream, Isobelle it's mine now, too. And I think it always was mine, you just showed me how to let myself want it."

"I was wrong. If I taught you to dream, then I was wrong."

3

“A favor, for you have mine, Sir Knight. Today, you are a knight. and today, you are my knight.”

hehehe

i don’t like this self aware foreshadowing

"Is it still jealousy if the girls are swooning over my alter ego?"

no sense of realizing isobelle's been hitting on her at every opportunity this is so entertaining

"Inevitably, things will ebb and flow, so how sucky would it be if I didn't live in these magical moments while I'm in the middle of having them?"

one party after another, i think its dragging a bit.

"What a shame this would be, to not see life play out like it's supposed to."

"I am in constant conflict with myself when it comes to my relationship with family. I feel guilty that I am complicating their cookie-cutter lives and that I create a burden where there was none before..."

"The fight to remain sweetly earnest as we age just might be the greatest fight of all."