Good lines
I told the therapist that she had helped me a lot. The chance to hear myself say these things aloud in a nondescript office building had made me feel utterly ridiculous. I was a legendarily self-involved person. What could I have done? But she had helped me rearrange some of the furniture of my mind.
They wanted it because they’d just gone through a bad breakup and needed an edge in the volatile dating market; because porn had warped their sense of scale; because who wouldn’t want it?
Seducing us and then repelling us — in that order — it dramatizes why we flock to such things in the first place
I can do anything, be anything I want. I can challenge the wind....
But poetry is not a marketing strategy or even an aesthetic — it’s a whole way of looking at the world and its language, turning them both upside down in search of new meanings and possibilities.
He was transfixed by the portrait. This is someone who has really seen, who has gone back again and again to see.
She wore a cream-colored silk blouse, black kitten-heeled shoes and a gauzy black bow tied artfully around her neck.
Many films are basically kits that require the audience to do the work not merely of interpretation but of characterization, based on a handful of clues.
What passed between me and Olive was not nothing. Many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.
The old—and never especially helpful—adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane. This rule also pertains in the opposite direction: the experience of the unlike-us can never be co-opted, ventriloquized, or otherwise “stolen” by us. (As the philosopher Anthony Appiah has noted, these ideas of cultural ownership share some DNA with the late-capitalist concept of brand integrity.)
The suggestion that the equivalent of juxtaposing bag/beg/big/bog/bug on a page could grant any noteworthy “insight into Vietnamese society” defies belief, but at least it’s funny.
They enjoyed reminding me of this ever since my childhood, spitting on me and calling me bastard, although sometimes, for variety, they called me bastard before they spit on me
the intense arabesque of Coney Island, with its violent, gyrating pleasures
It was some kind of way to scratch out a balance between being an individual and being part of something bigger than yourself, even though each side of the equation put the other in jeopardy.
They were too caught up in the business of developing and finding ways to represent their various selves.
Race became nothing more than ancestry and a collection of superficial physical traits. The 14th Amendment was no longer about alleviating the extraordinary repercussions of slavery but about treating everyone the same regardless of their “skin color,” history or present condition.
Wear whatever you want to wear at all times. I don’t own a tux. I don’t own a suit. I don’t own a tie. I don’t believe in dress codes. If there’s a restaurant that says it has a dress code, I intentionally violate it.
I swim and I don’t think of anything but the movements, my body extending stretching gliding. And even her ears, and her fingers in my mouth, and the hours and the hours, and Your boobs are amazing, and I bite her neck, and my tongue on her tongue, and her clean-shaven, delicate skin.
Vibes-based professorship. It’s working so far.
Censorship in the waning years of Communist Hungary was a velvet prison.
When I say we hope that the baby will be gay, I think maybe we’re all saying that we hope the baby will have an aesthetic life
Why must there be more? This is just this.
You could fit most of the solar system into the chasm between how the average American of the era would have reacted in that hypothetical situation and how Jeanne Manford responded upon learning that Morty was gay. “You don’t love him in spite of something,” she later declared on national television, her face free of shadow or blur. “You love him.”
If occurs to me that there are often two sets of trickery going on in my life. The illness -- the entity -- is always just off to the side. And then I try to trick the people around me. I'm OK, I'm functional, I'm fine. And maybe, sometimes, this determination to trick them tricks the illness itself. People with thought disorders to not keep a list of famous and successful people who share their problem. There is no such list.
For nearly two centuries, everyone but trans women have monopolized the meaning of trans femininity. Fearful of interdependence, many have tried to violently wish trans femininity away. The non-trans woman has become gender critical, willing to dispose of her trans sister to secure her claim on womanhood. The gay man celebrates queens as iconic but separates himself anxiously from faggotry’s intimacy with trans femininity, claiming he is only on the side of sexuality, not gender.
“Once again I’d compromised my own taste,” Priscilla writes of that moment in the memoir, which in Coppola’s world is the worst kind of fate.
In Narvik, at the top of Norway, I danced to James Brown at a disco in a geodesic dome in the August midnight twilight, when someone came in with a newspaper announcing Nixon’s resignation. In a museum in Basel I stared for a long while at a row of Lucretias, each stabbing herself through the heart. In Rome my youth hostel was in the Olympic stadium built by Mussolini, where the showers only ran cold.
that thought was pasted to my windshield, and yet I looked through it, having trained myself to do so.
I was about to make a radical break with my previous existence, but I have no way to reconstruct just how I proceeded to its execution. All I can remember for sure is driving 300 miles trying to decide whether to hit the mall in Albany in search of a wig store.
Sunday afternoon I walked down the steps off Columbus Circle into Central Park, and the odor of piss rose up from the rest rooms, and I knew a year had passed.
Manhood itself was peacocking, edged with violence. A strange combination.
there’s such a lightness of touch. You let things bloom in multiple directions at once. Your book is all about the unconscious. You make it feel as though these things are just rising up.
the difference between ideas and ideology is that ideology doesn’t require thinking. It actually lends itself to not thinking, and that, in turn, lends itself to being weaponized by bad actors
He is in the midst of a renaissance, a new public image propelled by private sensations: the weight of a ring, the scent of a leather microphone and how it’ll wear with age.
There was a real weight, even to wonderful reactions. I just feel like I’ve handed you a weapon. And even though you say “I love you, I promise I will never use this bow and arrow which has been specifically fashioned to find your heart,” you’re still holding it. So I felt like I was giving away something that could kill me.
My assumption that people are ultimately self-serving lowers my expectations and allows me to forgive.
I just remembered one of the very first questions I ever got asked when I started acting work: ‘Are you a good girl or a bad girl?’ I was 16, and my 16-year-old self wanted to respond with this film.
Sometimes you’re a friend of the family, sometimes you’re a tray that talks. It’s that sense of how your role can flip quite suddenly, without any warning depending on who’s talking to you, that you always have to navigate.
I think writers are often terrifying to normal people. There is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion.
The little boy I used to be, in the mirror making faces. I jones for it like it’s cocaine.
It felt brutish and graceful
The second and more intimate variety of reading is “unlicensed, private, leisurely, disreputable, promiscuous and anarchic.”
where midnite thinking begins at 5pm
Methinks what?” muses Sabbath in his grief. “Methinking methoughts shouldn’t be hard. The mind is the perpetual motion machine. You’re not ever free of anything. Your mind’s in the hands of everything.” It’s a passage unstable enough to remind you that Roth, the towering novelist, was a failed playwright as well.
Beautiful feelings. They sweep you away with their beautiful feelings. But the feelings disappear quickly once you are no longer posing for them. Once they’ve got you figured out and written down, you go. All they give is their attention
Rebecca loved gossip. She knew that it was where the truth lived.
His performance was almost all there, though he managed to enrich it for New York
For the recursive narrator, everything is a madeleine of torture.
great philosophical question for which I'm going to give you weird answer
she touches his hair while he is sleeping, a personal choice she made on instinct
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
I’m the prize! I’m the fucking prize!
I think we should postpone that fascinating and, um, timeless, question.
You ask why I am doing these things that I sense are largely inexplicable to you
it is a question of how much we can feel in the doing.
Nobody expected it but nobody is surprised
He planned to get an investment banking or consulting position at age 29, then start a company by 30, and ultimately exit it all by age 40, when he could finally turn his time to volunteering. The conviction of his assurance astonished me.
He’s always been allergic to just starting at the beginning and going from there. “I bristle at pretty much straight storytelling,” he said.
Time is impassive, more animal than human. Time would not care if you fell out of it.
When I watched “Barbie,” I realized how seductive patriarchy is onscreen or onstage, even when we say we are trying to smash it. Why do the Kens get that massive and amazing dance scene?
I felt more alive than I ever had, but alive in all ways: in love, in lust, in fear, and in pain. My relationship with the city was a chemical, visceral one. Back then I was fucking it, now I have married it. My life back then was scattered, impulsive, animalistic, messy. I generally hate the phrase making love, it's a euphemism that denies the darker, baser, rawer traits of another human that we should embrace and exalt. I was maddened by him, he was my succubus.
That touch had no place here, in a home two men had shared for fifty two years
The living cinema! Amazing! Unhinged!
waiting in line, I felt I had no body, but when I left the line, I felt hungry
the pause and lunge of his movements; the chewy lisp of his voice; and the dark, unsleeping fervor of his stare. It is as if someone were stoking a fire inside his head.
she runs through the offices with breathtaking strength as if gulping up freedom with each step. It echoes other films Gerwig has been involved in: the scene in Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” in which her Frances sprints down Manhattan streets, and the quicksilver way Saoirse Ronan’s Jo races through “Little Women”
You do what your heart says you have to. Because you don’t owe anyone your life. Not even me.
Seduction, like grief, is a state of mind and happens when preconditions are present, such as a hole in your heart left behind by a loss, or a loneliness that comes from circumstances that hold the spirit, a prisoner
And there [the ants] stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the life of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.
In the immediate aftermath of this failed exchange, I did the only thing I could do: take to my room and fester. On gender trouble: a punishing hieroglyphic
Or rather I am talking about them both, about the representation and the man himself, for didn’t I know he would like that story, about an old prospector who finds a nubile young girl left for dead in the desert? Glad you like it, Lee. It’s for you
try to get to something that really clicks for you, that you can feel the sting or glow of
I have built a working miniature replica of the patriarchy in my mind.
Watching, you almost feel mugged by the sense of belonging. That fabricated connection can be more beautiful than love itself
She also points to another intricate, devastating moment
I watched them again and again—especially the major ones: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown. Like all works of genius, they invited repetition. I ate them. They became part of me, the way something loved does.
Scopophilia - 'The consuming pleasure of looking’ is how he and I define it.
He was crying now the way anyone cries who has had it. There was passion in his crying—terror, great sadness, and defeat.
Or was there?
on loving movies: their ability to obliterate reason and abolish taste
all the people I had seen in my life driving with their windows down — I leaned my head out the window and howled.
If you do it well enough, the book or painting or film or sculpture you made will hold off time, in a way, for a while, and that is an extraordinary thing, and for me it’s the highest aim of art.
The question that should serve as a looping incantation is: who benefits? Who is feeding off this?
the true interiority is enshrouded in thick thoughts.
The singer sounded like he was foaming at the mouth. I was stuck in bed, but I felt like I was on fire. Someone screaming helped. But other music offered a more incandescent depth of feeling.
over her shoulder tried to take, with the camera of my head, a snapshot I could keep of the house
It's as if all these characters were already inside him, angles of his own personality.
bringing a new incoherence to my gender.
Instead, he takes the word apart, and doesn’t take Chiron apart with it.
Moss writes of a New York returning to what he sees as its rightful entropy, energy heaving up from under pavement to reveal a dirty, spontaneous city where anything can happen.
I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.
He talked to each of us in language cut to our different understanding
Sometimes I feel like a big cat in a small cage. I've done such desperate things at 3am.
She knew to believe in what is, not what if. She really understood that whole river of life. You have to let it pass through you so you can be emptied out and open to what’s next.
He loved films by David Lynch, the Coen brothers or Spike Lee, which unfold in their own elevated reality.
feeling worn down, my dreams are spinning out so i wake up freaked out and wondering what sort of world i'm in
What people went to Club 82 for was to experience bodies in a world of bodies.
Transitions are brave work. Like birth, like writing, transition is when hopes take material form and in doing so take on a life of their own.
We all have movies like that, titles that transcend ordinary categories of good and bad, and penetrate straight to our hearts.
The most lasting images are its joyous ones. There's a lot in the movie that's sad and painful, but after a few years what you remember is that classic white disco suit, and the Bee Gees on the soundtrack.
My skin a tight membrane stretched thinly over gallons of fluid feeling
It was a completely testesterone-addled set to film on
The tropes of writing about one’s ethnic heritage as an anglophone Vietnamese-something: “Vietnamese is a language that can caress or slice”, as though that weren’t true of any human tool
There is some serious vexation here. This time Cage really is cross as two sticks.
The Pynk is a refuge and a maw, a heaven and a hell.
You’re dressed like nic at nite.
How is your day here? Wet and vibrant. As all queer classes should be.
The film, with its space-food-like artifice, only seems to be made of nothing at all. It passes through the nervous system without delivering any sustenance or even leaving a residue.
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness.
People rape. Very few people are rapists in every sexual exchange.
Trans MC's family abandons them, but they're brave and strong. But what if I don't want to be brave and strong.
But I could see the stress like / percolating in his eyes
Accidental cameras happen all the time without reason. Things become cameras without our even intending it.
I regret this decision, as I regret all the times in my life I have turned away from living.
You don’t actually have to shoot Chekhov’s gun.
Yes to some extent. I listened to it when I was a teenager and I said to myself, is he singing to me??
These small but varied pleasures had distracted him for a while, but there was a difference between pleasure that soothed and lulled one to sleep and pleasure that drew the self more widely and vividly into the world.
He felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to.
There are times when it can feel as if your performances are vibrating at a different frequency than the movies in which they appear.
you are not a bad cat. You are not a good cat. You are good and bad. And bad and good.
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.
At ease in a white T-shirt, a slender golden chain visible underneath, he has the ready and easy smile of a boy, a collection of elegant porcelain urns and vases arranged on a shelf behind him. He recounts happy memories of being alone in Tokyo or Hokkaido, checking into a hotel with a novel, riding a bicycle for hours, going alone to art galleries and museums, and dining by himself at izakayas afterward, drinking sake and eating internal organs—liver, intestine, and ox tongue, which he remembers as a favorite of his father’s.
I love to irradiate myself with tweets and comments and likes and the frothy chaos of the feed.
From your cold apartment in January, you watch tricycles piled with like an 8-10 feet high pyramid of pomelo go down the street
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
Baldwin, tracking microclimates of feeling
I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
We wanted to stick a little knife in everything. If things are too sweet or too kind - I think a little bit of dissonance enhances the joy.
You don’t need to tell me anything about the leg. That’s up to you.
Have on hand your own stimulants, loved passages of the prose that matter most to you
Many days you’re sitting there not feeling like you’ve spiked a vein or like you’re in the roll and the trance of it.
The conflict would slip loose from the confines of a single image.
The joys of the night ride were the joys of feeling present in my body again, orienting myself amid the disorientation of pandemic life, which has a tendency to erase the body even as it threatens it, even as it demands of it endless productivity. Pedaling felt like a celebration of kinetic energy, of blood, cartilage and bone.
I wanted to pursue a restlessness of form. Can a country contain a restless mind, a restless person, a different person, a queer person?
Such delicate, profane fiction - these stories are grace and salt, tenderness and shadow
I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire
These weekends, which I took at the beginning of each month, were the full expression of all the compulsions within me that are unshareable by definition: to be lavishly alone; to eat in priestly silence; to stay up late reading; to think in the morning and write all night. Each trip was similar—the train, the car, the work, the pasta—but each thing was a little different every time.
I get afraid that I’m not hungry enough at least some of the time
It’s like the soundtrack to a life that’s already leaving.
I wanted to know what it would feel like to have a sound like that in my mouth.
Eloquent, unpredictable sentences
The music had always contained jaggedness and dissonance, intervals that make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, spidery notes.
My daughter’s friend has always been volatile, impulsive, creative, and compassionate.
Clarity and exhilaration.
People always tell the same stories, even when they try to tell new stories.
You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.
He wore a mustache and paint-spattered white jeans.
Alan, who looks like a thrift store James Dean, handsome and burly with a dimple on his chin.
There’s a man dressed like a Cossack, like an extra from the big pogrom number in Fiddler on the Roof.
The messy splendor of being alive.
“Part of the reason for the trip was simply to expand my lungs emotionally,” McCann said, to come in contact with what he calls “a true democracy of voices.”'
Great stories are born to those who can tell them.
Take gardens, for example. Gardens are really excellent sources of infinity.
All that coiled up youthfulness.
On eating a perfect eggplant curry: so magnificent, there's a sort of rip in the atmosphere.
I was still me in that world, but I felt like I felt now — grown up, after a fashion.
If you’re a writer, it’s because literature has saved you at some point. - Nathan Englander
We must have a desire to make scale models of the universe. - George Saunders
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I want you to be a human being, not a human doing.
NOSMO: the necessity of sometimes missing out.
It wasn't easy to build an alliance. I had to run with those cats, break bread with them, hang out at the pool hall. I had to lay down on their couch, in their neighborhood. Then I had to invite them into mine. - Bobby Lee, Black Panther, on allying with white groups.
Nicole Krauss on Oliver Sacks: that curiosity and humanity. All his stories were lit with that humanity.
The proper label for the study of the mind informed by computers is not Artificial Intelligence but Natural Computation. Steven Pinker
the sparse and noisy data of an uncertain world. - Goodman and Tenenbaum
I've got my feelings in my fingertips again - Brad Pitt on quitting boozing
What a sad trick. - Her
Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention? - Lady Bird
we found ourselves being critiqued from all sides. - Critique Response, Brendan Lake
Details in a story are just a means to give shape to another person’s consciousness. Choose them that way. - Chang Rae Lee
These characters want to emerge but they don’t know who they want to be when they emerge. - Chang Rae Lee
The only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success. - Alexander Chee
The terrible thing that is called life. Terrible, and beautiful. But you must know that is both. - James Baldwin
Historical novels have the aura of the well-mannered about them. This is wrong, of course. But I wanted to avoid any stink of stasis. The novel had to touch the present. It had to be raw up against the ‘now. - Colum McCann
He was in his element: he loves parties, materialism, and the sea.
To tell a good story you must look at the people specifically. Individually. And you will find there will be beauty there.
On confronting death: It was like trying to dress every morning for the weather in a nation we’d never heard of.
We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.
Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
It is impossible to believe now, but I was someone who could be pleased by simple things once. Back then, everything was new to me: all the world and all the people and all the soups.
"it’s “competitive with the problem, where it’s me vs. the unknown.”
Dennett, on 'looking' for symbols in the brain: Such rules no more need be explicitly represented than do the principles of aerodynamics that are honored in the design of birds' wings
(Stevens, on simple explanations form messy solutions): Reality in all of its radiant, complex profusion .
'A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.' (Turing)
To approach it with a kind of crazy joy?
I would rather have scientists who carry doubt with them as they proceed. (The Bad Show)
A parent’s love is always haunted by the specter of loss. We love our children so much it’s physically painful; they’ve made hostages of our hearts.
It was as if, in giving up racing and coming home, he had caused his life to come unstrung.
I liked the idea of telling my kid, “When you were inside me, we went to see the edge of the earth.” - Thanksgiving in Mongolia
You asked me what I care about most. Well, whenever I see anything that any person has done, what I care about is who did it and why. - Yo Yo Ma
Keep the nonmeasureables intact.
He stopped, looking inward, looking helplessly young, looking old. - James Baldwin.
On caviar sandwiches: All at once a little messy and a little decadent and a little modest. As my father would cheerfully say, “Diamonds and burlap!”
It’s very likely you’ll bust ass in all directions forever to compensate for not being a prodigy. Become okay with this.
On buttons at auschwitz: The variety and sameness of human life.
On picking books to live: Choosing is always a sweet sorrow.
Speak to your dead. Write to your dead. Tell them a story. - Alexander Chee
What we see and feel with our bodies, caught midway between atoms and galaxies, is but a small swath of the spectrum, a sliver of reality.
They have to live these gigantic lives to feel anything.
In the past I’ve repeatedly found myself away from the city, as a reporter or as a touring musician — it often felt like I was just pretending to live here. (On traveling)
He feels himself fill with strata of emotions.
Neoscholastic, occult properties (on Galileo)
Somewhere along the way, I felt very uncherished.
Time, that pliable illusory multidirectional stuff
Facts can be like gemstones. If you achieve perfect lucidity, oh my god, go and clone yourself.
For a good thing: simply ask yourself - can you make it better?
A riot of glutamates
You know, I still remember what it tastes like to be 11, 17, 27.
Consider an individual chickadee, call her Jayla.
Speaking freely but thoughtfully
A wild and reckless sympathy for humanity.
People in structurally inventive clothing lingered over plastic cups of wine.
They were probably thinking something that I often think in these situations, which is, just make the right kind of face.
Over the years I've come to realize that unity does not entail the eradication of difference. We don't have to be afraid of contradictions.
This is what we’re doing when we dismiss the relevance of other stories—the relevance, therefore, of other lives—and suggest that the aesthetic value of a human experience, such as straight-male desire, is exhaustible.