Aubrey V > Recent Status Updates

"... I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others. A tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others. Because nurturing that discourse was easier. Because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”

"Grandma looked at me and sighed a little under her breath, and then she said, 'you do not think so much about hunger if you've never been full.'"

"...I believe they do care, but not in any way that benefits the groups affected. They care about themselves. About control. About manipulation in media, in polling, in the spreading of fear until subservience is not only a relief, but a welcome one at that."

*The first page I read after finding out the election results at 4 am.

Talia waved at him. "I like burying things, like seeds and people who cross me."

Consider me a garden gnome, I've never related with a character more than I do Talia.

"Mind your manners, but always, always ask questions if you have them. Good people don't mind questions."

Reread. Listening on audible with Maxwell. It's interesting being reintroduced to Violet when I'm simultaneously halfway through reading Iron Flame.

Listening on audible for my second time "reading" this, one of my favorites!

Not my normal read but it came with presents (thanks Once Upon a Book Club) & I need an easy beach read while I'm half distracted by kids. 😅

I read this when it was first published nearly a decade ago and have recommended it countless times since. It's time for a refresher myself. This time I'm listening to the audiobook, narrated by author Robin Wall Kimmerer.

"To a parent, your child isn't just a person: your child is a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present that you're living and the past you remember and the future you long for all exist at once."

(Edited from passive to active voice.)

"She found herself molded into the shape that best fit what they carved her into. Water done wore away at her stone, and the next thing she knew, she was a damn river when she could have sworn she was a mountain."

"Other animals don’t have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn’t progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle."