I felt pretty good, actually. When you're still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure. By the time I was fourteen (and shaving twice a week whether I needed to or not) the nail on my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. …
Continue reading On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft – Stephen King – Quotes
I lay back, resigned, and wished my wife wasn't dead. I wished I wasn't lying terrified in a giant bird embrace in my hallway. I wished I hadn't been obsessing about this thing just when the greatest tragedy of my life occurred. These were factual yearnings. It was bitterly wonderful. I had some clarity. But …
Continue reading Grief is the Thing with Feathers – Max Porter – Quotes
I know it is a lot of quotes, but I did find this book very important and Solnit has a gift of writing succinctly and directly about the things we'd rather not consider. Naming is the first step in the process of liberation. There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie …
I loved Reva, but I didn't like her anymore. We'd been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses I'd let Reva borrow, which she'd promised to dry clean and return but never did. She …
Continue reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh – Quotes
Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you’re looking for. If you’re picking raspberries, you see only what’s red, and if you’re looking for bones you see only the white. If only she were a little bigger, Grandmother thought. Preferably a good deal bigger, so I could tell her that I understand how …
In Silicon Valley, where I live, the reigning assumption is that success is a race against time and obsolescence. If you're not rich by the time you're thirty, before your skills become obsolete and you become too decrepit to work hundred-hour weeks, you never will be. This is a model that works fabulously well for …
Continue reading Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less – Alex Soojung-Kim Pang – Quotes
Small interruptions, ordinary intrusions. Shocking only because they happened too early, or because we see the consequence; the way they change our behaviour. At the time these play out as so trivial, so common, we learn to forget them. Nothing really happened. Like Claire, like Delilah, we make change ourselves, to what we wear, to where …
Continue reading The Right Amount of Panic: How Women Trade Freedom for Safety – F. Vera-Gray
