Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.

— Luigi Pirandello / Six Characters in Search of an Author

To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.

— Jill Lepore / These Truths: A History of the United States

Nonconformity, when you’re married to it, ends up looking more and more like inertia.

— Eric Puchner / Dream State

. . . I long for
the ill-definition of my youth,
when I lay on warm park lawn
beneath a eucalyptus tree
and failed to read far in a great book.
Time was so slow and so thick
my word-sprung yearning
rode its drifts until, overpowered
by hunger, I fell asleep in the sun.
I did not know that I was happy.

— Jennifer Moxley / “After Turning the Clocks Back”

THIS IS A BOOK THAT DISPENSES ADVICE, COMPOSED by a writer of fiction. As with any such book or craft talk or social media rant or workshop critique, a lot of it is hogwash. I’m talking to myself. That’s all writers really do.

— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction

Having your heart broken is like finding out you have bedbugs—not in an emotional sense, but practically. Both broken hearts and bedbugs require extreme treatment. You can’t just wash your sheets and think that’s enough: Not only is it not enough, you’ve likely made the problem worse by carting your dirty laundry all over the place.

— Suzy Krause / I Think We’ve Been Here Before

All the time I had spent justifying myself. Wouldn’t it have been easier to have been gentle?

— Amie Barrodale / Trip

What I’m Listening To: 

The sun has gone out
We sign their papers
We line their pockets
You should leave now
You should leave now
You should leave now

— Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke / “The Men Who Dance in Stag’s Heads”