Upside Down Stranger Things Quotes

It's never over. Not really. Not when you stay down there as long as I did, not when you've lived in the netherworld longer than you've lived in this material one, where things are very bright and large and make such strange noises. You never come back, not all the way. Always, there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier, thin as the glass of a mirror. You never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad. It is the distance of marred memory, of a twisted and shape-shifting past. When people talk about their childhood, their adolescence, their college days, I laugh along and try not to think: that was when I was throwing up in my elementary school bathroom, that was when I was sleeping with strangers to show off the sharp tips of my bones, that was when I lost sight of my soul and died. And it is the distance of the present, as well - the distance that lies between people in general because of the different lives we have lived. I don't know who I would be, now, if I had not lived the life I have, and so I cannot alter my need for distance - nor can I lessen the low and omnipresent pain that that distance creates. The entirety of my life is overshadowed by one singular and near-fatal obsession.

I am on a curiosity voyage, and I need my paddles to travel. These books… these books are my paddles. ~ Dustin Henderson, Stranger Things 2

Dinner first, then dessert. Always.” HOPPER

That’s what it should be. But that’s what a I slowly grokked* it rarely was. Instead it was indifference, and acts mechanically performed, and rape, and seduction as a game no better than roulette but with poorer odds and, prostitution, and celibacy by choice and by no choice, and fear, and guilt, and hatred, and violence, and children brought up to think that sex was ‘bad’ and ‘shameful’ and ‘animal,’ and something to be hidden and always distrusted. This lovely perfect thing, male-femaleness, turned upside down and inside out and made horrible.

Always at the same time, at half past four, he visited the woman who once had been a stranger to him, a woman who in her madness confused all the facts of living, who saw things as they were not and people as they were not, who turned everything upside down and inside out.

irony here is kind of cringe-inducing, too. If I try to put the effect of that earliest workshop into less bromidic words, the best I can do is this: it was like having my world turned upside-down, and then realizing that, in fact, the world had always been upside-down, and I had just come right-side up. There was a sense of relief in knowing that all those things that had looked so wrong—the injustice of violence against women, the limits placed on us because of our gender, the fear of losing our mothers, our sisters, ourselves—were, in fact, wrong. That I was right to be angry about them. Empowerment-based self-defense training left me with a completely new way of looking at self-defense—a perspective diametrically opposed to mainstream approaches to safety.

The current spirit of our country inclines us to be troubled. It’s a sensible temptation. How can any one person or small group of people make a difference? How can we change and renew things so that our children grow up in a better world? We come back to a question suggested at the start of this book: How can we live in joy, and serve the common good as leaven, in a culture that no longer shares what we believe? The answer to that question springs from a simple historical fact: On a quiet Sunday morning two thousand years ago, God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. This small moment, unseen by any human eye, turned the world upside down and changed history forever. It confirmed Jesus’ victory over death and evil. It liberated those living and dead who lay in bondage to their sins. An anonymous ancient homily for Holy Saturday, speaking in the voice of Jesus Christ, reminds us of the full import of his resurrection: I am your God, who for your sake [has] become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants, I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated. Jesus rose from the dead so that we could be joined to him and his victory. Believers know that Jesus was not only victorious then, in Jerusalem. He’ll also come in royal glory at the end of time, when he will judge the living and the dead. At Christ’s second coming, his kingdom will fully arrive. His reign will be complete. The time in which we find ourselves is an interim one. We may struggle as we seek to follow Jesus, but we also remember the great victories of our King: the victory in the past and the victory certain to come. And those victories give us hope. Hope

The edges were blackened with fingers of soot spreading around the wall. It looked like something from the Upside Down – Morgan had just binge-watched all of Stranger Things and it was still on her mind.

That is the wonderful thing about making changes and meeting strangers, Jamie. You never know when, and you never know who, but someday a stranger will burst through the door of your life and transform it utterly. The world will be turned upside down, and you will be happier for it.

As if there were fewer stranger things in my upside-down world, the interview panel members eyed me with horrified fascination like I was a Demogorgon seated before them. They leaned forward to pick up the uncanny beeps emanating from me with a “Did you hear that?” expression on their faces. In retaliation, I looked down on the miniatures and gazed at the drama unfolding before me with such interest.