Sally Grace’s Reviews > The Knockout Queen > Status Update

"Even God can't understand everything," she said.
"I thought that was the whole point of God. That he could understand everything”
"Some things he chooses not to understand," she said.
"What do you mean?" I thought she was cracked, now truly and finally cracked.
"That's the whole point of hell, isn't it? A place to put the people God chooses not to understand?”

“I suppose I had thought that I dreamed it. That I was so desperate for love back then that I was willing to project it onto even an old man who lied to me. But it was still here, whatever it was.
I didn't know whether to call it love or joy or just connection, but it was all of those things, and it was generated by our proximity…”

“…cheap cars interspersed with gleaming BMWs…The accused & their attorneys…& I thought that inside the building, the pageant of justice was being performed, as though the contestants had free will, as though anyone could blossom into a hero or a monster through sheer force of character…if you were poor, your car simply had more dings in it…They were not signs of individual moral turpitude.”

“"God, I love you," Anthony said, looking at me with his wet brown eyes, pure and beautiful as the eyes of a deer. I felt I could see him as he had been at every point in his life: as a hopeful little boy, as an arrogant teenager, as an earnest college student, as a tired father, as a man, a brave man, a man who chases after his own vitality and refuses to give up on what is right even when it's wrong.”

“Though of course Ms. Harriet thought of herself as a loving mother. Ms. Harriet lived in a world of doing, where her actions were as clean and formulaic a sheet of Lego instructions. To clothe the child and feed the child and teach the child is to love the child. Those actions are the same as the metaphysical state for a person like Ms. Harriet.

“I turned myself into a flesh violin like all the others and placed myself on the marketplace, uncertain how to say the things I needed to say: I can't host, I have no car, I have no money, I have little experience and what experience I do have is weird and scary, I am a ball of nerves, I am terrified, no one knows who I really am, I think about killing myself daily, I like to read books, please don't murder me.”

“I got the sense that, even though he was overtly grateful for his life, he was also someone who found life's beauty inextricably mixed with sadness. He was devoutly Catholic, and it always seemed to me that this informed the development of his personality, the way he liked to clasp the hands of the staff as we said goodbye, as though the hands were the conduit through which blessings could be communicated.”

“It was then that I understood that these encounters were fundamentally about loneliness, flashes of intense intimacy so awkward and fragile that they had no place in real life. The men I met online were not secret initiates into a world I could take part in, but refugees from the world I already knew too well.”

“I wanted nothing to do with that fey boy who accepted himself, and it pains me now to wonder how my life would have gone had I been psychologically sound enough to have made friends with him and begun so much earlier the hard work of attempting to love myself. I probably would have really loved Glee.”