“Let me tell you something, and I want you to remember it: who you authentically are—there is no one and nothing that can add to or subtract from that.”
Emma Forrest, Your Voice In My Head: A Memoir (Other Press, May 3, 2011)
“There is nothing you can do with uselessness, nowhere you can put it down, you just have to carry it around all ugly and obvious.”
Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)
“I feel the waters rising up around my heart. They don’t stop. This is my last breath, this is my last heart. I’m searching frantically for an air pocket.”
Emma Forrest, Your Voice In My Head: A Memoir (Other Press, May 3, 2011)
“Much easier to miss someone than it is to love them… Easier to regret than it is to act.”
Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)
Daybreak. 5:40 to 5:50 am, Sept 7, 2022. 64° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. (@dkct25 on Instagram)
“We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be.”
Richard Avedon, in Emma Forrest’s: “Your Voice In My Head: A Memoir” (Other Press, May 3, 2011)
“I’ve been geared for battle my whole life.”
Selma Blair, “Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up” (Knopf, May 17, 2022)
“Why is human fragility something I am so embarrassed about?”
Abi Morgan, This is Not a Pity Memoir (Harper, June 7, 2022)
The great artists don’t even bother to put it down on paper: they live with it silently, they become it.
Everyone has their own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is. If you can get it down on paper, in words, notes, or color, so much the better. The great artists don’t even bother to put it down on paper: they live with it silently, they become it.
— Henry Miller, Stand Still Like The Hummingbird (New Directions, June 17, 1962) (via Alive on All Channels)
Who would I be without my constant yearnings?
If I could quiet this conga-line of cravings
what lingering longings would I lament?
What radiant unattached insights
would I muster? Who would I be
without my constant yearnings?
It’s a world of want. You get the idea.
—Tina Schulman, from “A World of Want” from “Praising the Paradox: Pomes (Red Hen Press, July 9, 2019) (via Alive on All Channels)
Just a little bit more
“A reporter once asked Rockefeller how much is enough. His answer: Just a little bit more. And that’s all we want: to eat and sleep, to stay dry and be loved, and acquire just a little bit more.”
— Richard Powers, The Overstory: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company; April 3, 2018) (via Alive on All Channels)
so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken—I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Mariner Books, January 1, 1950) (via Alive on All Channels)
“Life is futile,” says my new therapist, Michaela, “and no one gets out of it alive. There is only love.”
Emma Forrest, Your Voice In My Head: A Memoir (Other Press, May 3, 2011)
the end of each lexical entry –a blank space
She had been working on the illustration plans for a few months, now; each lexical entry would be surrounded on the page by sketches, paintings, loose strokes of wild landscape or precise, inky detail, depending on the word, and at the end of each lexical entry – a blank space,
to fill in one’s own definition.
The words could be homonyms, like bolt, buckle, entrance, fair, hatch, mine, squash. Or just beautiful, unusual words. Cherish or cascade. Elixir. Susurrus. Petrichor.
— Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)
I found this thought surprisingly moving
Other Things I Know:
She inhales around thirteen pints of air a day and exhales billions and billions of molecules of oxygen in a moment. There is a theory that every person will have a sliver of
every other person that has ever lived just quietly pass on through them at some time or another. I find this thought surprisingly moving.
— Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)