Austin Sill > Recent Status Updates

Returning to the shores of the House after five years is captivating. I love this book.

“But common sense said we should have surrendered two years ago. Common sense is common, has no imagination, and only works by precedent. It leaves the man who follows it poorer, if not in pocket, then in his heart. Fuck common sense.”

“It’s poetry we’re doing,” he whispers. “It wouldn’t mean a thing if it were easy.”

“For a moment they remain still, petrified in animal terror. But then one of them asks what it was, and Portia reaches within herself and finds that part of her that was ever open to the incomprehensible: the fearful and the wonderful understanding that there is more in the world than her eyes can see, more than her feet can feel.”

“My mother used to say to me that she collected sorrows and put them in her pocket. Walking around with them that way, by and by, you just learn to carry them all a bit better, to stand up a bit straighter. That's all life is, on this earth anyway. You'll see it, too, when your trials come. I wish I could tell you they won't come, Jessica, but they always do."

“I would like to learn a new use for my emptiness-my spaciousness. Look at the rosewood mandolin in the corner of this bedroom. People string catgut over a hole, and send music pouring into the atmosphere. Maybe I can restring myself, and learn how to make music from my hollow place.”

“‘I came here to pray to God,’ Ania screamed at me. ‘You pray to Money. You beg Money to grant you Land. You pray to Land to grant you Money. You are a convert to the gods of this country.’”

“The more we learned, the less I wished to understand who we were in this story…

It is very possible to live in a house built from stolen timber without thinking of oneself as a thief. For years, I did this.

I am a Catholic who moved to Nebraska to live out Christ’s teachings. Love your Neighbor as yourself. Give him the shirt off your back. We took everything from the Indians. Even their children.”

“God must be a man, or how could She stand this?”

“Reality was a story Vick was telling himself. The future was his possession. He’d make the past whatever it needed to be to obtain it”

Echoes of Orwell, “he who control the present controls the past, he who controls the past controls the future.”

“But here is the nature of life. That we must live things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.”

God I love Sally Rooney

“I thought about it because I was in the habit of considering every angle of a question, and I'd never had any form of entertainment other than thinking.”