Sarah > Recent Status Updates

“…Monticello is a plantation, and that slavery was a system that created the economic prosperity that enabled our country to exist.”

“I am a reader. I am intelligent. I have something worthy to contribute.”

“I guess there is no bottom to a person, but I feel you have left fewer stones unturned than anyone else who’s ever passed through, and it’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid.”

We live in between what we choose and what is chosen for us.

“‘Tis often a wise notion to adapt to the culture you find yourself in.”

“My mom said that if I was going to be proud of myself for being generous, that I had to do it even when it meant I might lose something. She said, ‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’l

Some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.

“Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two.”

“America had given her so much in the four years since she arrived, but it also regularly reminded her of how it saw people like her.”

“Some boats are made for the river and some for the ocean. And there are some that can go anywhere because they always know the way home.”

“Walking through life with integrity means not deceiving yourself or others.”

“When someone dies, everything about them becomes past tense. Except for the grief. Grief stays in the present.”

“Citing such differences, these experts have concluded that some cultures, however sophisticated they become, remain at their core tribal, in that the obligations the individual owes to others within the tribe are very different from those owed to outsiders.”

“That’s how losses of rights build. They start small. And then soon, the rights are stripped in droves.”

“The only society worth living in is one where everyone has access to food, shelter, clean water, and health services.”

“Parents have an uncanny ability to know when their children are having a hard time. Just by glancing at their back, the way they stoop, they can tell if something’s bothering their child. Parents always know.”

“Towards a world where we can sleep without worry.”

“It’s a funny thing. The person we fall in love with, we hardly ever call by their name. Because it’s somehow just so obvious that it’s you I’m talking to, that it’s you I’m always thinking of. Who else?”

“The most remarkable thing about losing a parent is that you don’t even need to miss them for their loss to be felt. The basic function of a parent is just to exist. You have to be there, like ballast in a boat, because otherwise your child capsizes.”

“Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”

“You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.”

“She had to be both mother and father to the boys, and no doubt she did her best, and that’s the worst thing about being a parent: that almost everyone does their best, but almost all fail regardless.”

“There’s a kind of boundary for the sort of emotions you’re prepared to share with others when you’re hardly comfortable sharing them with yourself.”

“It’s hard to say ‘I love you’ when you’re fourteen years old. And completely impossible to dare to whisper: “Don’t hurt yourself, because you’d be hurting me, too.’”

“He would often try to think that perhaps that has to be the case: that our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that’s how we learn to figure out our horizons.”

“We try so hard to be a good example for our kids. But maybe what they really need is to see us as human.”

“The one we love the most in life may not be the one we love the best.”

“There are different kinds of love in this world, and there is room for all of it.”

“But that’s the funny thing about the universe—it has such wondrous possibilities for us, far beyond anything we could imagine for our own lives. Even when it seems like life is going to be a series of predictable days. All we have to do is open our eyes and believe in them: the possibilities. Expect the unexpected and that’s where you’ll find the magic.”

“Sometimes you have to do that—take the thing about you that makes you the saddest and learn how to spin it into a superpower.”