bossypants

"What Turning Forty Means to Me: I need to take my pants off as soon and I get home. I didn't used to have to do that. But now I do."
--Tina Fey, Bossypants

the blind assassin

"What I remember then was Reenie, from when we were little. It was Reenie who'd done the bandaging, of scrapes and cuts and minor injuries: Mother might be resting, or doing good deeds elsewhere, but Reenie was always there. She'd scoop us up and sit us on the white enamel kitchen table, alongside the pie dough she was rolling out or the chicken she was cutting up or the fish she was gutting, and give us a lump of brown sugar to get us to close our mouths. Tell me where it hurts, she'd say. Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where.
But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling."
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"I stood outside my house, my former house, waiting to have an emotion of any kind at all. None came. Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it."
--Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

black boy

"Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn."
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"I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that I would never feel; I was becoming aware of the thing that the Jim Crow laws had been drafted and passed to keep out of my consciousness; I was acting on impulses that southern senators in the nation's capitol had striven to keep out of Negro life; I was beginning to dream the dreams that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo."
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"As I, in memory, think back ... I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task ... If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part—though symbolically a significant one—of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs."
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"An hour's listening disclosed the fanatical intolerance of minds sealed against new ideas, new facts, new feelings, new attitudes, new hints at ways to live. They denounced books they had never read, people they had never known, ideas they could never understand, and doctrines whose names they could not pronounce."
--Richard Wright, Black Boy

my last image was as the first

"Much has been said about Robert, and more will be added. Young men will adopt his gait. Young girls will wear white dresses and mourn his curls. He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him."
--Patti Smith, Just Kids

"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last."
--Charlotte Bronte, Preface to Jane Eyre

elaborate taking care

"I believe in the elaborate taking care of others. And we live in a culture where 'I'm not my brother's keeper,' 'That's your responsibility,' 'Get a life' have become bywords, code phrases, anthems for elaborate indifference, selfishness, greediness, and the failure of empathetic acceptance. In the same way that we need to repair the economy, we need to repair the effects of an economy of selfishness. And that isn't just the filling in of the big bucks that have fallen out of the system. The rescue that we need is emotional rescue, communicative, large-hearted. I've always dreamed that ... readers and writers are expanders of feeling centers, of the global ability to imagine other lives."
--Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's Bookworm

a cleansing

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
--Pablo Picasso

the moviegoer

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick.
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."
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"Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears for the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive."
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"Our is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal."
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[The romantic] means that he hopes to find himself a girl, the rarest of rare pieces, and live the life of Rudolfo on the balcony, sitting around on the floor and experiencing soul-communions. I have my doubts. In the first place, he will defeat himself, jump ten miles ahead of himself, scare the wits out of some girl with his great choking silences, want her so desperately that by his own peculiar logic he can't have her; or having her, jump another ten miles beyond both of them and end by fleeing to the islands where, propped at the rail of his ship in some rancid port, he will ponder his own loneliness.
In fact, there is nothing more to say to him. The best one can do is to deflate the pressure a bit, the terrible romantic pressure, and leave him alone. He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to the movies."
--Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

if you don't know what the word means, don't use it

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."
--Stephen King

revolutionary road

"At first glance, all the upper floors of the Knox Building looked alike. Each was a big open room, ablaze with fluorescent ceiling lights, that had been divided into a maze of aisles and cubicles by shoulder-high partitions. The upper panels of these dividers, waist to shoulder, were made of thick unframed plate glass that was slightly corrugated to achieve a blue-white semi-transparency; and the overall effect of this, to a man getting off the elevator and looking out across the room, was that of the wide indoor lake in which swimmers far and near were moving, some making steady headway, some treading water, others seen in the act of breaking to the surface or going under, and many submerged, their faces loosened into wavering pink blurs as they drowned at their desks."
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"The trouble, he guessed, was mainly that she talked too much. It was also that so much of her talk rang false, that so many of its possibilities for charm were blocked and buried under the stylized ceremony of its cuteness."
--Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

"There are certain rights that are not to be subject to popular votes, otherwise they are not fundamental rights. If every fundamental liberty can be stripped away by a majority vote, then it's not a fundamental liberty."
--California State Attorney General Jerry Brown

your own personal hero

"Everyone's a hero in their own way, in their own not that heroic way."
--Joss Whedon, Zack Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, and Jed Whedon

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
--Cyril Connolly

looking past

"All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life. Whose history can ever reveal very much? In my view Americans put too much emphasis on their pasts as a way of defining themselves, which can be death-dealing."
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" ... what I am a proponent of is forgetting. Forgetting dreams, grievances, old flaws in character—mine and others'. To me there is no hope unless we can forget what's said and gone before, and forgive it."
--Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

half slumber

"Half-slumber took him. [They] turned out the lights and all was quiet and then a succession of images came forward, resurrected by some crow-eyed part of his mind that would neither wake nor sleep. Fragmentary emotions possessed and released him, drawn like garments from a wardrobe and discarded, one after another. Below that chaos of image and memory, something so powerfully suppressed he would barely remember it: the idea that everything once true in the world was now past, and a thousand new possibilities had been loosed."
--David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

immersed in creation

"Fiction specifically is an organic whole and allows you to immerse yourself and your mind in another mind's vision. The reading experience is quite intense, really, and to my mind, not well understood or even much talked about. Directed dreaming while awake is one shorthand, but that leaves out the language component, that is, most of the picture. Many think language is what makes us human; reading therefore makes us more human, more intensely ourselves. Reading is a creative experience for the reader, and fiction involves the most intense creative process on the part of the reader. That creative process is what energizes my love of reading and fiction in particular."
--Rick Kleffel, NPR Correspondent

stupid is as stupid does

"You're not stupid. You're just in Congress."
--Gust L. Avrakotos character in Charlie Wilson's War

"Politeness. Now, there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying about whether he'd hurt someone's feelings. But then he was a genius."
--Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

sunbeams

"You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive."
--James Baldwin
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"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly."
--Andrew Harvey

soul mirror

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it."
--Elizabeth Gilbert, quoting Richard from Texas, in Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia