Grethe > Recent Status Updates

”Still, the thought stays with me through the quiet night. That we are determined by our landscape, that our lives are decided by the hills and the rivers and the trees.”

”You are not Gretel, you say. My daughter Gretel was wild and beautiful. You are not her.”

”But if I do know more than most, it’s because I read.”

”’Are all the flowers in Nana’s garden wild?’ I asked. ’All living things are wild’, Nancy answered. ’Even children?’ ’Especially children.’”

“Everyone you know is both good and bad, it’s part of being human.”

“You’re a disgrace to depression, and you don’t deserve to call yourself that child’s father.”

”You are good, child. Pure. Quiet. Kali does not want quiet. She wants storm. She wants ruin wrapped in silk.”

”This is an offering.
To the goddess who dances on corpses.
To the men who leap smiling into the void.”

”Yes, that’s right, you’re the problem. Mothers are always the problem, he says.”

”Maybe he’s right. But here’s the crux of it, owl-baby. Your father wants to fix you, and I want to love you as you are.”

”The birds are telling me that my life’s work, as your mother, will be to teach you how to be yourself - and to honor however much of the wild world you have in you, owl-baby - rather than mold you to be what I want you to be, or what your father wants you to be.”

”This is my superpower, he thinks: to make a dark even darker than what’s around me.”

”A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones - with or without citizenship - aching, toxic and underpaid.”

”The olive tag stitched to the boy’s chest frames a word. Although the woman can not read it, she knows it signals a name, something given by a mother or a father, something weightless you carry forever, like a heartbeat.”

”I ran until I forgot I was ten, until my heartbeat was all I could hear of myself.”

”Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”

“Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.”

”MORS JANUA VITAE”

“I have always had a soft spot for storytellers. I fall in love with their words, then I fall in love with the people who wrote them.”

Oh! A lovely map! #dopaminrush

“I started doing several breathing exercises at once that all canceled each other out.”

“”Okay, I said, and did a little dance, a silly jig, like Humpty Dumpty or a lesser-known egg.”

”There was no way she could have known the import of what she was saying, but it was crystal clear: she had my back as I had hers. We must expand now, at this age, and despite all our fears there’s plenty of room, she was saying, physically. Or at least that’s how I took it.”

“It went without saying that she lived alone. Bed-in-the-livingroom or marriage - you couldn’t have both.”

…I’ve got a bed in my living room. Makes me feel like I’m in my twenties again! 😄

“Every day there were opportunities like these. Every day Sam and Harris extended their hands and said, Come in from the cold. But I could not come in.”

”the real me is in my work. Any fan of my work knows me better than you do.”

”If you were a French man this would all be perfectly acceptable, Jordi said.
She was a really good friend.”

”I was quiet now, bludgeoned by this vision of intimacy. It wasn’t a matter of having lost this conversation; I had lost at life.”

”De som frågar. Jag vet inte vad jag ska berätta. Jag skojar bort det och säger: Har du sett de brutala förlossningsscenerna i House of Dragons?
Folk skrattar. Men jag menar blodigt allvar.”

”Jag funderade mycket på varför man inte blir sjukskriven efter en av de största bukoperationer man kan genomgå. Försäkringskassan förklarade att jag är förälder och följaktligen får föräldrapenning. Då ska man tydligen klara vad som helst. Sjukskriven behöver man inte vara.”