Other People's Writing
“…As has everyone on the whole planet, including those hunter-gatherers who live deep in the rain forest and were trying for no contact. Just once I wish someone would say that and the Good News would turn out to be something else.”
—Jenny Offill, Weather
Because there is too much to say
Because I have nothing to say
Because I don’t know what to say
Because everything has been said
Because it hurts too much to say
What can I say what can I say
—Toi Derricotte
“It’s in the nature of years to feel exhausting in retrospect. The world is punishing; we have short collective memories and a cognitive bias that makes us recall bad events more vividly than good ones. The awful folkways of social media—which encourage us to call out bad things in dramatic fashion and then pretend that we’ve been helpful—have led to something of an annual conclusion.…
I’m worried that the ‘worst year ever’ feeling is half a condition of the Internet, of the way we experience the news as delivered through social media. Everything feels too intimate, too aggressive; the interfaces that were intended to cheerfully connect us to the world have instead spawned fear and alienation. I’m worried that this sense of relentless emotional bombardment will escalate no matter what’s in the news.…
There is no limit to the amount of misfortune a person can take in via the Internet, and there’s no easy way to properly calibrate it—no guidebook for how to expand your heart to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience; no way to train your heart to separate the banal from the profound. Our ability to change things is not increasing at the same rate as our ability to know about them.”
—Jia Tolentino, “The Worst Year Ever, Until Next Year”
Broken windows and empty hallways,
A pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it's gonna rain today.
Scarecrows dressed in the latest styles,
The frozen smiles to chase love away.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it's gonna rain today.
Lonely, lonely.
Tin can at my feet,
I think I'll kick it down the street.
That's the way to treat a friend.
Bright before me the signs implore me:
Help the needy and show them the way.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it's gonna rain today.
Lonely, so…
—
“‘Hello...’ ‘Hello...’
Love and deeper understanding
I turn to my computer like a friend
’Hello…?’ ‘Hello...?’
I need deeper understanding
Give me deeper understanding”
—Kate Bush, The Sensual World (30 years old today!)
“What’s most compelling to me as a writer and a person is how we become who we are. How do we go from that kid on the playground who made that weird animal sound whenever he caught a ball to being a mixed-use real estate developer?”
—Chris Ware, Publishers Weekly
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
—Ada Limón
“When I rode up in my elevator alone at night after work, wearing the trenchcoat and carrying my book bag, I always became flooded by a melancholy vanity, as if I were being watched through a hidden camera. ‘Here is a young woman living in New York. It’s the end of the day, and she’s going home to her apartment.’ To me, my self-conscious weariness was cinematic and fascinating. It made me feel like an adult. Now I mostly get that feeling when I’m going home in a taxi late at night, but I don’t know whether the feeling is still really mine or whether I ripped it off from ‘My Dinner with André.’”
—Nancy Franklin, ”No Place Like Home,” The New Yorker
I’m starting a category called “Other People’s Writing” for the purposes of collecting great sentences & beautifully articulated ideas:
“Looking at these pictures, it is impossible not to feel the palpable tug of time’s undertow, the inexorable movement toward we-know-not-what…. Here is photography’s ultimate irony: it can freeze time, but never stop it.”
—Chris Wiley, “Lee Friedlander’s Intimate Portraits of His Wife, Through Sixty Years of Marriage,” The New Yorker