“Inside this isolation booth there was no swearing, no furious X-ing out of copy, no yellow copy paper reeled onto pitted platens, no impatient slam of carriage returns. Just the relentless stamping out of disembodied sentences in rote rhythm unlike real writing.”
-- The Art of the Wasted Day, by Patricia Hampl, page 117
"The secret in talking to birds is in the steadiness of each limb as you make your way into their territory, in the deliberateness of each movement and bend of tree branch and grass blade. ... perhaps you could try to find a little tranquility, find a little tenderness in your quiet."
-- from World of Wonder by Amee Nezhukumatathil, page 97
“She was not wrong -- the mind designs the body.”
-- from The Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry, page 75
“... perhaps the best thing creative work can do is to compost into soil so that, unremembered, it becomes the food of a new era, or rather, devoured, digested, the very consciousness of that era. Marble lasts, but soil feeds.”
-- from Recollections of my Nonexistence, by Rebecca Solnit, page 222
“Out here, it was as if the world had backed off from them for a spell. They believed in the fated-ness and meant-to-be’s. They believed in the dark star that was theirs to steer by.”
-- from The Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry, page 72
“Collage is literally a border art, an art of what happens when two things confront each other or spill into each other, what conversations arise from the conjunction of difference, and how differences can feed into a new whole.”
-- from Recollections of my Nonexistence, by Rebecca Solnit, page 150-151
“The present becomes the past through increments too small to measure; suddenly something that is becomes something that was, and the way we live is not the way we lived.”
-- from Recollections of my Nonexistence, by Rebecca Solnit, page 204
“They say when you’re lonely you start to lose words.”
-- from Weather by Jenny Offill, page 168
“They say people who are lost will walk trancelike past their own search parties. Maybe I saw you. Maybe I passed you on the street. How will I know you? Trust me, you’ll say.”
-- from Weather by Jenny Offill, page 199
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