Mel > Recent Status Updates

"...I cannot now read his poems or books without their evoking in me a more intense sadness than his drawings. I hear him in every line and every thought, in every humorous and extravagant fancy. The tenderness that was germane to him and the quality of clowning."

"Spiritually, too, he passed for a typical Dorimarite; though, indeed, it is never safe to classify the soul of one's neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool."

"By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow—so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us."

"What this town has done, it's like pickling people. Taking us when we're young and fresh and vulnerable, sticking us in a jar and filling us with all these rules they hope will preserve us from the rotting decay of worldliness. But you can't brine someone in that much guilt and shame their whole lives and expect them not to change. Shrivel into mere husks of their former selves, sour as vinegar."

"As hard as it is to shovel dirt over your father's grave, it's still easier than trying to say 'I love you' out loud."

"The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, “I will,” and “I will not,” and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves."

"The futility of the samsara. Samsara is preferring death to life. It comes from always trying to create safety zones. We get stuck here because we cling to a funny little identity that gives us some kind of security, painful though it may be. The fourth reminder is to remember the futility of this strategy."

"Her melancholy was like a darkness in her; but when she thought of him it seemed that through the darkness a forked lightning ran."

"Occasionally, she saw herself from the outside: a small lake of melted ice cream, and in the coffee-colored slush swam a tiny acrid nubbin--Sasha's fear. Sasha did not like looking at her fear. It looked like a half-digested piece of meat."