Lucy Dacus > Recent Status Updates

Isn’t it grand, isn’t it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love- from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust?… Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay… But in God’s good name, leave the meaning of love unresolved!

“I’ve wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but I still love life. That ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most pernicious inclinations. What could be more stupid than to persist in carrying a burden that we constantly want to cast off, to hold our existence in horror, yet cling to it nonetheless, to fondle the serpent that devours us, until it has eaten our heart?”

“Is anyone ever sufficiently admonished by admonitory tales, or are such myths simply maps of inevitabilities?”

… no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you earn or stash or hoard or bunker up, no matter even your fleet of spaceships, you will never be self-sufficient or independent. Because nothing living is.

We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us.

To believe in “the greater good” is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

This lady just called traffic “secular communion”

But I think you cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and and reducing the possessed.

To speak is to stumble, to hesitate, to detour and hit dead ends. To listen is straightforward. You can always just listen.

Started off strong, then became a bit repetitive. To me, it felt like the climax came in the first third, but I enjoyed reading it throughout. The writing is super clever, many outstanding sentences. I know it's not a book, but I'd recommend this to fans of Search Party.

"When we really love someone, we've got to accept their role in the mystery."

"We live at the mercy of certain silences."

Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

“History, both the arm holding down the drowning body and the voice claiming the water is holy.”

Damn, hanif

“The love I have to give is malleable, but it has its limits. All of our love has its limits, and it should. I choose to love my people, and their people. And sometimes I might also choose love with your people. But other times, I choose whatever keeps me safe, and that isn’t necessarily hate, but it might be if it gives me a comfortable enough distance.”

... the ambition I feel to express my sentiments in words so pure that I am unworthy to know their meaning

from The Northern Protestant:
“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful.”

from Lesbos:

I should sit on a rock in Cornwall and comb my hair.
I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.

from A Fly In Buttermilk:
“... the future is like heaven- everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.”

... What would the dark
Do without fevers to eat?
What would the light
Do without eyes to knife, what would he
Do, do, do without me?

Footnotes > endnotes, I’m already sick of flipping to the back of the book for context.

“Every door is the same when I kneel in a corner- with a hand over my mouth. Every bathroom floor is different, but no mourning I do feels familiar. It feels brand new.”

Willingness is next to godliness.

!

“If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?”

Persisting isn't always safe, but it's often necessary.

"If you were a girl, and you were imagining your life through literature, you would go through literature, you would go from innocence in childhood to sadness in adolescence to bitterness in adulthood- at which point, if you hadn't killed yourself already, you would simply disappear."