Fiona’s Reviews > On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous > Status Update

"Because being knocked down was already understood, already a given, it was the skin you wore. To ask What’s good? was to move, right away, to joy. It was pushing aside what was inevitable to reach the exceptional. Not great or well or wonderful, but simply good. Because good was more often enough, was a precious spark we sought and harvested of and for one another."

I honestly hate this writing style 98% of the time.
"It’s late in the season—which means the winter roses, in full bloom along the national bank, are suicide notes.

Write that down.

They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it."

"Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living thing."

"Because I am your son, what I know of work I know equally of loss. And what I know of both I know of your hands. Their once supple contours I’ve never felt, the palms already callused and blistered long before I was born, then ruined further from three decades in factories and nail salons. Your hands are hideous—and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream."

"Because your name is Rose, and you are my mother and the year is 1968—the Year of the Monkey."

"No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is stunted?" I don't get this comparison here. Pleasure is the mother tongue, not that the mother tongue is pleasure. So why compare it to a more literal meaning of mother tongue? Not sure why this passage tripped me up so much but it did.