Molly > Recent Status Updates

“And I wanted to unite like this as well: numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motiva-don, ambness as the reason to exist, numbness as ecstasy.”

“The actors in these images are mostly dead legends.
They were not trying to mimic reality, or perhaps they were unable to mimic reality. Perhaps reality had not yet been sufficiently falsified for its retrieval to seem worth it.”

“We cannot imagine loving or being loved in that way. The real-isation that we no longer love those people that we once loved is unsettling. It is as though we no longer love ourselves. Can it be true that work, in the end, has proved more lasting than love? Or is it that work, without us realising it,
has somehow interfered with
our capacity to love?”

“Our control and maintenance of them is our own choice. We know people who do not take care of their body and who live openly amid their decay.
These people often seem happier and more at ease.
They seem contented with their mortality, as though their body were their longtime companion who has stuck with them through thick and thin. They are not severe with it; they don't discipline it, as we do.”

“I didn't know how to answer this because it didn't matter to me what the characters did. They existed, and I just wanted to convey a mood, immerse a reader into a particular atmosphere that was built from carefully selected details. What did the young people do? This suggested there was a plot, a story that was going to resolve itself.”

“We enjoy sunsets in the places to which we travel but we have forgotten that they also happen here, in the place where we live. The realisation that we can watch sunsets here is pleasing. Presumably there were also sunsets in the place where we grew up, but if there were we neither noticed nor cared.”

“If we faced for even a moment the naked truth of our own bodies what would become of us? It is in our minds, our souls that we trust.”

She wasn't thinking about them, but maybe you are. Wondering who went when and how.
Because for a farm to pass from the hands of one man who cradled it damn near like a Fabergé egg into the hands of four people living disparate lives in different cities, including one who couldn't even remember to pee after sex, there must have been deaths.

Darla was characteristically diplomatic.
"Boys are made of need,"
she told her
daughter. "You can't imagine all the things they'll need from you. What you need to do is make sure they don't take anything you don't want to give."

On the porch, I'd look at the beautiful skyline and the playground and people moving around, but not without that gate in my face; at Robert Taylor, we were always watching the world through those bars. Like we were in captivity and wouldn't ever be free.

As we drove, the buildings kept changing color every few blocks: red, then white, then red, then white, then red. Our version of the flag, these buildings, like crumbs we scraped up from the plate of somebody else's American Dream.

That day is cemented in my memory. We watched them knock down what we thought was indestructible. I’d learn that so many things that I thought were solid and structured in my life could be broken down, bit by bit, just like those buildings.

Hank looks up at me. “Don't you get it? Of course you don't, you're a dumb thug. Let me spell it out: we're all fucked. We're dead.
Everything is dead. All life: drowned, burned, or starved."
…
"Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we'll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other."

from: Beverly Hills, Chicago

Nobody is furious. Nobody hates these people.
At least, nobody driving by in this car.
It is only natural, however, that it should occur to us How much more fortunate they are than we are.

“A lesson it had taken me much longer to learn: sometimes the love of strangers is much more terrifying than the hate.”

this book is so bizarre in the best way. i’m not a parent but it’s exactly what i imagine parenthood to be.