Austin Meakim’s Reviews > Mao II > Status Update

The prisoner perceives his own wan image in the world and knows he’s been granted the low-status sainthood of people whose suffering makes everyone ashamed.

She was thinking that everything that came into her mind lately and developed as a perception seemed at once to enter the culture, to become a painting or photograph or hairstyle or slogan.

She thought there were lives that constantly fell inward, back to first knowing, back to bewilderment, and this was the reference for every bleakness that passed across the door.

Bill’s own scratchy voice in one of his clear-souled semidrunks of some years ago, saying, “Stories have no point if they don’t absorb our terror.”

[survival] and it also means you hide what you own inside something else so that you may seem to possess one chief thing when it is really many things bundled and tied and placed inside each other, a secret universe of things, unwhisperable, plastic bags inside plastic bags, and the woman is somewhere in there too, bagged with her possessions

This person knew some things about bundling and tying. Survival means you learn how to narrow the space you take up for fear of arousing antagonistic interest

There must be something about the tunnels and crypts of the city that makes people think they are Jesus.

You live in a fuckin’ ass mansion you got to think about it two times a month for like ten seconds total. Live in a shithole, it takes up your day. They cut the shithole in half, you got to go twice as hard to keep it so it’s livable.

Only those sealed by the messiah will survive.

This wasn’t a public park but some life-and-death terrain where everything is measured for its worth.