Category: Quotable

I wish that, at the end of life, when things are truly “done,” there was something to look forward to. Something more pleasure-oriented. Perhaps opium, or heroin. So you become addicted. So what? All-you-can-eat ice cream parlors for the extremely aged. Big art picture books and music. Extreme palliative care, for when you’ve had it with everything else: the X-rays, the MRIs, the boring food, and the pills that don’t do anything at all. Would that be so bad?

—Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

Verifiable knowledge makes its way slowly, and only under cultivation, but fable has burrs and feet and claws and wings and an indestructible sheath like weed-seed, and can be carried almost anywhere and take root without benefit of soil or water.

—Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954), II.4., p. 134

Middle age is a wonderful country, all the things you thought would never happen are happening. When he was fifteen, forty-six would have seemed the end of the rainbow, he’d never get there, if a meaning of life was to show up you’d think it would have by now.

Yet at moments it seems it has, there are just no words for it, it is not something you dig for but sits on the top of the table like an unopened dewy beer can.

—John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

DAPHNA: Yeah. Jewish law prohibits tattoos of any kind but even if it didn’t that wouldn’t be a problem for me because just for like me personally, when I like step back and reflect on all the things that had to occur in the universe over billions of years so that I could be alive, in my body, right now, like, we’re made of the same things as stardust, that’s how connected we are, to everything, so to be like, who cares about the natural, larger-than-life mysterious universal reasons why my body was designed the way it is, like, screw that, I’m just gonna permanently etch this doodle onto my body which is composed of the same things that are in stars?!?!

—Joshua Harmon, Bad Jews

…he was as highly evolved as any successful young Charter could be, the elements of his existence rigorously tuned, as were those of all his peers, with “best practices” in mind, those ever-optimizing metrics that we in B-Mor know as well as anybody, though ours are, of course, designed ultimately to smooth our unitary workings. Charters, on the contrary, are always striving to be exquisite microcosms, testing and honing and curating every texture and thread of their lives, from what they eat and watch and wear to whom they befriend and make love to, being lifelong and thus expert Connoisseurs of Me.

—Chang-Rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (2014), p. 256

TED CHAOUGH: Just cash the checks, you’re gonna die one day.

Mad Men, s7e2

Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.

—Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People” (1955)

In Provo Canyon, Utah, Scott Carrier gives a master class in writing to a young Afghan:

“Look down at the river,” I said. “Do you see any places where you could jump from rock to rock and make it across to the other side?”

“No,” he said, “there is too much water.”

“Well, imagine there is a place like that. I want you to think about writing as jumping from rock to rock. Can you swim?”

“Not very well.”

“Good. If you fall, you’ll drown. In order to jump to a rock you must answer my question honestly in your own voice, not the voice of someone else. If you try to answer in someone else’s voice, you’ll fall into the river and drown.”

—Prisoner of Zion, “Najibullah in America”

The phone is about the same size as a cigarette pack. It’s no surprise to me that the traditional cigarette lighter in many cars has turned into the space we use to recharge our phones. They are kin. The phone, like the cigarette, lets the texter/former smoker drop out of any social interaction for a second to get a break and make a little love to the beautiful object. We need something, people. We can’t live propless.

—Aimee Bender, “Wordkeepers”

…perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffett seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that’s hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American’s yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.

—Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (2006)

Rain gone, and in sun again we could hear the consumption of an island. Large pieces of the bank fell thunderously into the water, because the Yukon had decided to yaw. We passed a deep fresh indentation in the shore where a dozen tall spruce had plopped at once. They were sixty-foot trees, and so much of the ground that held them had fallen with them that they now stood almost vertically in thirty feet of river. Ordinarily, as a river works its way into cut-bank soil the trees of the bank gradually lose their balance and become “sweepers”—their trunks slanting downward, their branches spread into the water. The islands of the Yukon have so many sweepers that from a distance they look like triremes.

—John McPhee, Coming into the Country (1977), pp. 279-280