There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly. Although their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique. But their ugliness was …
Brains are individual phenomena producing wildly varying products; uteruses bring forth one kind of creation. Maybe our obsession with happiness is a way not to ask those other questions, a way to ignore how spacious our lives can be, how effective our work can be, and how far-reaching our love can be. Masculinity is a …
Continue reading The Mother of All Questions: Further Feminisms – Rebecca Solnit – Quotes
There was food and drink. The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal. He'd homed in on that flag issue, the flags-and-emblems issue, instinctive and emotional because flags were invented to be instinctive and emotional - often pathologically, narcissistically emotional - and he meant that flag of the country …
Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. The public gallery experience is one that encourages art at a trot. The average reader (and we must remember that the average reader does not exist before the late nineteenth century) is a product of modern schooling and conservative taste. T be …
Continue reading Art Objects. Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery – Jeanette Winterson – Quotes
Looking at my reflection really did soothe me, though I hated my face with a passion. Such is the life of self-obsessed. I was terribly grim and unaffected, unfriendly. Or else I was strained and chipper and awkward, grating. "Ha-ha", I said, "Coming or going, that's me - flat." I'd never learned how to relate …
What they mean is that manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and middle-class jobs are harder to come by for people without college degrees. Fair enough - I worry about those things, too. But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It's …
Continue reading Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis – J. D. Vance – Quotes
He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs. His three daughters were awfully nice, though they resembled him amazingly, and on the mornings he woke up with a gloomy view of their matrimonial prospects the office would read it in his eye and tremble, because, they said, he was sure to …
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 …
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