"Winters were especially confining. We were all tied—as if by rope—to that sooty black furnace. Which has a certain romance, I know, if you tell the story right, a certain Victorian ghost-story earnestness people like, and I've told the story that way to the delight of shark-tooth-wearing dates in coffee shops." -- Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves
(October 4, 2024) #characters #compromise #family #wonder
"I didn't like how she changed with Leo around, how all her gestures were stretched out of size with a touch of performance. I didn't like how deferential she was with him, but also charged somehow, confident she could draw his attention if she wanted it." -- Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves
(October 4, 2024) #characters
"I found it difficult to imagine that slippered, thin man leaving such a mark. He seemed insubstantial to me—though stubborn, maybe, like a stain." -- Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves
(October 4, 2024) #characters
"Emily looked at him like she no longer spoke his language. This meeting had gone somewhere she hadn't thought it could get to. It had flown free of her grasp, when she didn't known it had wings." -- Johnny Compton, The Spite House
(October 4, 2024) #characters #change #wonder #writing
"There's a poem to be had tonight, if she can just get her fingers under its lid and open it up." -- Stephen King, Holly
(October 4, 2024) #writing
"For her, an ocean of unspoken urgency surrounds the hull of her leaky skiff of nervous chatter, so there are always words for her, and rarely a pause for consideration of content." -- Jessica Ward, The St. Ambrose School for Girls
(October 3, 2024) #characters
"We're going to my mother's version of the wizard, and out of the two of us, I'm the only one who cares what's behind the curtain. My mother is not just content to be on the surface; staying superficial is necessary for her survival." -- Jessica Ward, The St. Ambrose School for Girls
(October 3, 2024) #characters #compromise #family
"I'm used to this expression on people. Behind their eyes, they're wondering about me, connecting dots that, if I could read minds, I suspect would make me defensive and sad, even though they're probably somewhat close to the truth." -- Jessica Ward, The St. Ambrose School for Girls
(October 3, 2024) #characters #compromise
"The attractive are often agents of the very thing that blesses them, stewardesses coming down the aisle with rolling carts of collateral damage." -- Jessica Ward, The St. Ambrose School for Girls
(October 3, 2024) #characters #compromise
"Our brains don't allow us to press ahead without paying the toll of memory and making at least a short trip into the past. You can't drive to your next meeting if you don't remember where you parked your car. Can't remember where you parked it if you don't remember what kind of car it is. It's all simple until it's impossible." -- Scott Carson, Where They Wait
(October 3, 2024) #compromise #memory #science
"For my father, reality's gentle rain has become a bombardment." -- Justin Cronin, The Ferryman
(October 3, 2024) #characters #change #family
"She possessed an unusual quality of happiness—not that she herself was happy, which I now doubt; rather, that her presence had the power to arouse positive feelings in others. It was her special gift, one I can attest to." -- Justin Cronin, The Ferryman
(October 3, 2024) #characters #compromise #wonder
"So overwhelming was his sense of her, it was as if he'd traveled backward in time." -- Justin Cronin, The Ferryman
(October 3, 2024) #characters #wonder
"It wasn't an easy face to talk to, especially when you were about to lie." -- Michael Harvey, The Innocence Game
(October 3, 2024) #characters #compromise
"The answers could be combined in a seemingly infinite number of ways yet always will result in something dead." -- Sabrina Imbler, How Far the Light Reaches
(October 3, 2024) #change #compromise #death #science
"Your best bet is to throw random. In the long run random always wins. Your opponent can't figure out your process if you have no process. But you can't naturally throw random. You can't generate random. No one can. Human minds generate patterns. It's what they do. It's what we do. Humans do patterns. Some professional gamblers memorize π starting at the hundredth decimal place, and use those numbers to make decisions that their opponents can't possibly predict. Random is power. Completely committing to random would be a superpower." -- Penn Jillette, Random
(October 3, 2024) #change #compromise #money #science
"In one season of Celebrity Apprentice, the president of the United States of America, hosting the show before he was the president of the United States of America, said to a Vegas magician on the show that he—the fucking idiot Vegas magician—was one of the three people that Trump had ever met who was smarter than Trump himself. Donald had met only three people smarter than him in his life and one of them was a Vegas magician. Who were the other two, a balloon twister and a ventriloquist?" -- Penn Jillette, Random
(October 3, 2024) #characters #compromise
"I had ceded all control of my life to this feeling of a storm approaching, and the glad certainty it would demolish everything I knew." -- Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
(October 3, 2024) #change #compromise #family #wonder
"His face went slack for a long moment, that brief corpse face that comes when living is too difficult." -- Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
(October 3, 2024) #characters #change #compromise #death
"New lovers are always digging their graves and lying down, smiling, scooping the dirt in with their clean hands." -- Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
(October 3, 2024) #characters #compromise #death #wonder
"Her adoration had a way of leading my blood around in my body like an obedient dog." -- Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
(October 3, 2024) #characters #wonder
". . . as if he has mixed up a palette of pastels, and given himself permission to brighten a Rembrandt." -- Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
(October 3, 2024) #characters #compromise
"She courts underestimation. She plates and eats it with a dash of salt." -- Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
(October 3, 2024) #characters #wonder
"The power of prohibition is fragile, especially once the lines seem arbitrary." -- Chelsea Manning, README.txt
(October 3, 2024) #change #compromise
"One barber asked if he could shape my eyebrows; he said he wanted the practice. And so from then on, he'd thread my brows into a feminine shape, a small thing that made me feel more like the person I knew I was. It touched me deeply." -- Chelsea Manning, README.txt
(October 3, 2024) #characters #change #memory #wonder
"And what about the rumor about keyholes? That you can… become steam and go through them." "I wish I could," laughed the vampire. "How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No." He shook his head. "That is, how would you say today… bullshit?" -- Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
(October 3, 2024) #change #wonder
"In front of me, a young girl dressed in white was clutching a photo with both hands, tears in her eyes. She kept glancing over toward the McDonald's, where her father was waiting for her. Behind me, two older women were holding hands, speaking in Spanish. For so long, I had lived a solitary life, hoarding my memories of Lila like some secret treasure I couldn't afford to lose, sifting through them, day by day, on my own, as if my sister's death was a thing no one else could understand. Now, everywhere I looked, I met the faces of the dead." -- Michelle Richmond, No One You Know
(October 3, 2024) #characters #change #death #family #memory #wonder
"Every story is an invention, subject to the whims of the author. For the audience on the other side of the page, the words march forward with a certain inevitability, as if the story could exist one way only, the way in which it is written. But there is never just one way to tell a story. Someone has chosen the beginning and end. Someone has chosen who will emerge as the hero and who will play the villain. Each choice is made at the expense of an infinite number of variations. Who's to say which version of the story is true?" -- Michelle Richmond, No One You Know
(October 3, 2024) #compromise #wonder #writing
"Lola suspected that her life had been too long, so simple and light that now it lacked the weight needed to disappear." -- Samanta Schweblin, Seven Empty Houses
(October 3, 2024) #characters #compromise
"I hold the cookie up, my eyes widening as I realize an assortment of sewing needles, thumb tacks, and a single quarter have been baked into it." -- Chuck Tingle, Straight
(October 3, 2024) #characters #compromise #food #wonder
"Brandon doesn't look after his allies, but his allies are better than that. He's a lucky man, not because I've forgiven him, but because I was nothing like him in the first place." -- Chuck Tingle, Straight
(October 3, 2024) #characters #compromise
"I've wasted so much energy making excuses for guys like this, taken the high road so many times that I'd completely lost my sense of elevation." -- Chuck Tingle, Straight
(October 3, 2024) #compromise
"Isaac kicks at the hard-packed dirt. "So, what should we do now?" he asks, and she feels a pang of gratitude that he's still including himself. Being with Isaac is easier than being alone. She's never had that with a person before." -- Kiersten White, Mister Magic
(October 3, 2024) #characters #change #family #wonder
"Yo, Mack!" a woman shouts from the back storeroom. The change in the clerk is instantaneous, posture straightening and face lighting up. "Found a whole box of Hostess that expired last week! Date night's on me, baby!" The clerk lets out a tiny, high bubble of laughter, and Val's aware she's witnessed something private and precious. She wishes she could transform someone that completely just by calling their name." -- Kiersten White, Mister Magic
(October 3, 2024) #characters #change #family #wonder
"You give up. You finally admit that the people who are supposed to love you will do anything to keep you in line. Will let anyone do anything to you if it means you stop fucking up their lives. And you don't forget that lesson, don't forget how it felt to stand in your dirty boxers, begging for clothes, while your family slept comfortably hundreds of miles away. Not when you go home, not when you go to college, not when you go to law school. Not when you marry the woman they chose for you, do the job they chose for you, pose and smile for the photo ops they chose for you. You never forget the lesson that they would rather destroy you than let you inconvenience them." -- Kiersten White, Mister Magic
(October 3, 2024) #change #compromise #family #memory #money
"This place taught me I would only have value if I did what I was supposed to." -- Kiersten White, Mister Magic
(October 3, 2024) #compromise
"She chose a system that promised to change her children to make her own life easier. She wanted dolls, not daughters." -- Kiersten White, Mister Magic
(October 3, 2024) #characters #change #compromise #family
"People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult." -- Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire
(October 3, 2024) #compromise
"He was waiting out his father's disappointment as if it was a rainstorm and he happily settled in the window of a café with a newspaper and a hot chocolate, nowhere special to be. The squall would pass and he would venture back into the pale, clean-washed sunshine." -- Francesca Segal, The Awkward Age
(October 3, 2024) #characters #change #compromise #family #food
"Her detachment was radical, and thrilling. It wasn't that she didn't notice what her parents did but that, having noticed, she then returned, unfazed, to the concerns and interests of her own life. Gwen, in the active process of collecting characteristics with which to furnish her future adult self, coveted this one in particular." -- Francesca Segal, The Awkward Age
(October 3, 2024) #characters #change #family #wonder
"It's not that I'm unhappy in our apartment, but I have sometimes wondered whether my yearning for nature and the mountains is heightened by a need to escape from digital numbers and buttons and menus and things that beep and efficient little electric motors that hum away discreetly." -- The Couples Trip by Ulf Kvensler
(October 3, 2024) #change #characters #science
"'Now you're dead, trapped in the underworld. You feel empty, stuck. And you know what? It's actually the most powerful place to be. You need only reach out to the pain and grab it, use it. But if you don't?' Her expression turned mournful. 'Well, then you stay dead.'" -- Julia Bartz, The Writing Retreat
(October 3, 2024) #writing #death #compromise
"She liked stories, particularly those that were dark and off-putting. She wanted to gaze at them directly, to hold them in her palms." -- Julia Bartz, The Writing Retreat
(October 3, 2024) #characters #wonder #writing
"Let's just say it's two parts science and one part mystery." -- Daryl Gregory, Revelator
(October 3, 2024) #science #wonder
"Writers are monsters, really. We eat everything we see." -- Catriona Ward, Looking Glass Sound
(October 3, 2024) #writing #compromise #writing
"She has learned to do her crying elsewhere, in measured bursts. That's private, too. Sometimes she sits in coffee shops with her Walkman, earphones in. Then she cries. People don't question it so much if there's something playing in her ears. But what they don't realise is that she's not sad, all that was burnt out of her long ago – she's gone. What they're looking at is the charred case for her rage." -- Catriona Ward, Looking Glass Sound
(October 3, 2024) #characters #change #compromise #death #memory
"He'd been quiet, reclusive. David had always thought of him as distant and, quite frankly, strange. Consciously or unconsciously, he'd kept a wide berth of the boy, as had most of the others. A wallflower, yeah, but poisonous to the touch." -- Philip Fracassi, Boys in the Valley
(October 3, 2024) #characters #wonder
"Be careful you don't confuse evil with despair. One reason tragedy exists is to teach us how to help others, help others learn how to find a way through their own dark time, through a journey of growth." -- Philip Fracassi, "Boys in the Valley"
(October 3, 2024) #change #compromise #wonder
"Our lives are so short that it seems a crime to squander any of it by forgetting. Memories extend our lives backward through time, making them feel longer. And that's what we want. So we try to remember. But sometimes, when we do, we wish that we could just forget again." -- Dathan Auerbach, Penpal
(October 3, 2024) #memory #compromise
"The events of our lives unfold linearly, but in the mental reel of these past experiences, most of the frames that haven't been completely stolen by time are left distorted and blurred by it. When you try to reconstruct the series, you find that it isn't complete, but maybe this never really bothers you, because you can't miss what you don't remember." -- Dathan Auerbach, Penpal
(October 3, 2024) #change #compromise #memory
"Luxury is a type of meta-diversion designed to help us forget about all the things we had to do in order to obtain it in the first place." -- Christian Cantrell, Scorpion
(October 3, 2024) #money #compromise
"Arguing with someone you love is a form of hubris—a kind of baseless, arrogant confidence that you have so much control over your future and so much time ahead of you that you can afford to squander an entire day of emotional connection, or an hour, or even one goddamn minute." -- Christian Cantrell, Scorpion
(October 3, 2024) #compromise #family
"But every once in a while, when the world is expecting you to zig, the best move you have is to zag." -- Christian Cantrell, Scorpion
(October 3, 2024) #change
"Randomness is usually more the result of our inability to see patterns than the actual absence of them." -- Christian Cantrell, Scorpion
(October 3, 2024) #compromise #science
"Orla began the strenuous mental exercise of trying to come up with a restaurant that was inexpensive, close enough to walk to, and stocked with normal bread baskets, not focaccia or olive loaf or anything that might make her mother say, derisively, 'Ooh la la.' Ten minutes later: 'Ooh la la,' Gayle said as the waitress set down the bread basket. Orla sighed. 'But it's just rolls.' Gayle pointed at the dish next to the basket, which, instead of wrapped pats of butter, held a pool of oil and herbs for dipping." -- Megan Angelo, Followers
(October 3, 2024) #characters #food #family #money
"Orla had never not known she would move to New York. That was where authors grew, and she would be an author. She thought, when she walked into a bookstore as a kid, that the novels on the shelves had been emitted, nearly automatically, by the grown-up iterations of each American high school's best writer." -- Megan Angelo, Followers
(October 3, 2024) #characters #writing
More than anything else—to be an author, to have a boyfriend, to learn how it felt to breathe without being forty thousand dollars in debt—she wanted the answer to the question. She was living in the before of something, and she was getting tired of it. The dangerous thing about the way she felt, Orla knew, was that she didn't know exactly what she wanted to happen, and she didn't care that she didn't know. Almost any change would do." -- Megan Angelo, Followers
(October 3, 2024) #change #characters #money
(October 4, 2024)