“God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat.
We keep bumping into one another and laughing.”
-Hafiz
“The Bulge, for example, was not a place, but a description: it is the description of the line of battle–the MLR, or Main Line of Resistance. Eventually, everything comes down to geometry, to volume and to mass. First there was a line, then there was an attack, and the line bulged, like my wife’s belly while she was carrying our son. A sleek and tender curve, gravid with hope and risk.”
-T.M. McNally
“I don’t expect the anxiety to go away
but I want the anxiety to know
its place in the scheme of things
of which I seem to consist.
I want anxiety to be
not an attention getter or star,
but faceless, like a butler bearing trays”
-Michael Dennis Brown
“The citronade of the pale morning sun shimmered like a multitude of violins…”
-Angela Carter
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”
-Joan Didion
“She wonders, Why do other people have pets? Is it for the same bad reason as she? What is her bad reason? She doesn’t know. They aren’t even cute, the turtles, this one especially. It looks like an oven mitt.”
-Deb Olin Unferth
“The yachts, the gleaming motor launches, the sloops, the tern schooners with crews of twenty, they ringed our barge like ants feeding from a fat aphid day and night.”
-Stanley Crawford
“The hunger as big as a bear.”
-Alberto Ríos