things other people wrote
“Like Ishmael said: Being paid — what will compare with it! It was embarrassing, how proud of herself she felt. The check proved that she’d been alive these weeks, that she’d accomplished something, however trivial. This was why people grew so attached to earning money, even money they didn’t need. This was how they justified themselves. This was how they kept score.”
—Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
May 2012
1 post
April 2012
1 post
“His brain refused to stay locked up inside the echo chamber of his head—it spilled out, it overflowed and poured across the world until it was touching a thousand people who had nothing to do with him. If his brain wasn’t allowed to do this, if Danny kept it locked up inside his skull, a pressure began to build.”
—Jennifer Egan, The Keep
October 2011
2 posts
“He chiseled open the fault lines in the others’ personalities.”
—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
“When one unlocks a woman’s body, her box of confidences also spills. … After the Act, I am happier just lying still, but Jocasta talked, impulsively, as if to bury our big black secret under littler gray ones.”
—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
March 2011
1 post
“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
January 2011
1 post
“And though she never spoke of it, and no doubt seldom thought of it, she was a religious woman. That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.”
—Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
July 2010
6 posts
“He was in his chair, taking a nap. She stood above him and watched him twitch, his hands fluttering as if he’d been drugged. He was in her house: her husband, the love of her life. He was back. He made it. He left; he returned. She wanted to know him again, to enter the nightmare and be in there with him, to fight the demons with her own good weapons. She wanted to join him, but the chair was too small and his brain was his only and all she saw in the ditch were sweaters and a too light sky.”
—Aimee Bender, “What You Left in the Ditch,” in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
“She often remembered the day she first grew breasts, how her usually olive skin was covered with red, criscrossing stretch marks, like a newly revealed secret map to the treasures of her body.”
—Aimee Bender, “Skinless” in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
“I used to put more words in the diary, but when I looked back on what I wrote, I noticed I’d become like a cheap newspaperman about my life, only telling unpleasant things—when I fought with my wife, or how much money I had given my daughter, or a time I was eating at a restaurant and a woman fell off her chair from a seizure. So I stopped writing words and decided to stick with just the paintings and the weather. It isn’t much of a diary, but it’s accurate, at least.”
—Wells Tower, “Door in Your Eye”
“O, vanilla milkshake, you are sweet and salty / and you have chunks of lava in you.”
—Jose “BJ” Antolin, Jr., Grade 3. “Vanilla Milkshake,” in The 826CHI Compendium, vol. 2
“She was molten in my bed, but she also suffered depressions that were very dear to her. She would often call just to sigh at me for two hours on the phone, wanting me to applaud her depth of feeling.”
—Wells Tower, “Down Through the Valley”
“For quite a while, we’d been nothing but an argument looking for different ways to happen.”
—Wells Tower, “Down Through the Valley”
June 2010
2 posts
“Later on, when I tried to imagine how I might have ruined things, that would occur to me — that I’d so rarely resisted, that I hadn’t made it hard enough for him. Maybe he felt disappointed. Maybe it was like gathering your strength and hurling your body against a door you believe to be locked, and then the door opens easily — it wasn’t locked at all — and you’re standing looking into the room, trying to remember what it was you thought you wanted.”
—Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep
“I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator. Why didn’t I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts.”
—Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
