I’m not sure what I am any more.
That’s OK. There’s no rush.
It is not what I thought it would be, he then said, so quietly, and though she did not know exactly what it was, it seemed most likely that what he meant was life, and this, she understood completely.
It never is. It never is!
— Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)
“Please let this book just reach one person,” she would think while finishing Amy and Isabelle, imagining a young woman in a library in the midwest pulling it off the shelf one day, hoping “it would bring her something that she didn’t know she needed”. Never mind the Pulitzer and the plaudits, she’s just “so glad” to have found her readers, she says. “That’s what I wanted to do, and I’ve done it.”
— Lisa Allardice, from “Elizabeth Strout: ‘There’s a quiet rumbling of violence in America. Is it going to expand and explode?’” (The Guardian, Sept 24, 2022)
“The best kind of work…when your whole body feels like an instrument.”
Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)
“It’s nice to see how you care for your wife. You are like a pair of mandarin ducks.”
Kang Ki-young (Jung Myeong-seok), Extraordinary Attorney Woo: “Mr. Salt, Ms. Pepper & Attorney Soy Sauce” (S1:E11 - 2022)
“Morning kneels quietly at our feet, opening its pale palms out to us.”
Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)
Daybreak. 55° F. 6:02 to 6:25 am. September 25, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. (@dkct25 on Instagram)
“I love to write,” she says simply. “I want to connect with somebody so that they can see their life in a different way even just for two minutes, or have some momentary sense of transcendence, as though the roof were a little higher for a few minutes. And they can look around and they can say, ‘Oh, right, it’s just life, it’s just life.’”
— Lisa Allardice, from “Elizabeth Strout: ‘There’s a quiet rumbling of violence in America. Is it going to expand and explode?’” (The Guardian, Sept 24, 2022)
Some moments I find I can only relive through
the cracks between her fingers. Where the brush
sits. Where locks of his hair once stung.
— Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)
“It is a gift in this life that we do not know what awaits us.”
Elizabeth Strout, Lucy By the Sea: A Novel (Random House (September 20, 2022)
“The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.”
~ Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; March 6, 2007) (via Alive on All Channels)
“When you are lost or caught up in an emotional storm or contracted in self-centeredness or plagued by obsessive thoughts, notice what happens when you step outside or go for a walk and pay attention to the sky, the air, the light, the movement of wind, the feel of grass under your feet.”
Mark Coleman, from “A Breath of Fresh Air” (Tricycle, Summer 2005) (via Alive on All Channels)
In the pursuit of perfection,
I forgot I was already enough.
~Caroline George, The Summer We Forgot (Thomas Nelson, March 8, 2022) (via Make Believe Boutique)
High-res
Swans Sleeping @ Daybreak. 6:38 am. 42° F. September 24, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT (@dkct25 on Instagram)
Daybreak. 42° F. 6:05 to 6:48 am. September 24, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. (@dkct25 on Instagram)
because if her body has taught me anything
it is this: the best way to ruin a perfect moment
is by letting it continue.
— Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)
