“Constitutionalism didn’t burst from the head of James Madison, like Athena from Zeus, simply on account of all the books he’d read. Sure, constitutionalism flew from the pages of those books, but it was also shot from the barrel of a gun.”
-Jill Lepore
“When I write, it’s as if I were butchering eels… I pay little attention to the unpleasantness of the operation.”
-Elena Ferrante
“It was hard to tell the nature of the look from across the expanse of equipment, under the gym’s flattening fluorescent light. Either way, she had her pale eyes fixed on him, and every once in a while, in the middle of a set, she gave him an effortful smile. The amount of weight she was lifting, he saw, was significant. An immense iron stack rose up slowly behind her like an omen.”
-Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
“At the time, a good portion of the rock music played on the radio–Imagine Dragons, Linkin Park–was so densely and fastidiously produced, so airless and unrelenting, that listening to it felt like getting whopped in the face with a snowball. ‘Boys & Girls’ suggested a different way forward: it was not without potency, but it drifted in like a salty breeze.”
-Amanda Petrusich
“I washed my hands as if they were children, cradling first one and then the other.”
-Miranda July
“The effect of this was palpable and immediate, and she felt as if she were petting a large skittish animal, like a horse or a bear, skillfully coaxing it to eat from her hand.”
-Kristen Roupenian
“Say nothing. Let her button her shirt, let her comb her hair, the sound of it stretching like a sheet of fire between you.”
-Junot Díaz
“Generous gestures, when she attempts them, seem to swipe through the lives of others like a random bear paw, often making matters worse. And she finds no momentum in sharing, in benevolence, in charity, no interaction with another person ever brought her a bolt of pure aliveness like entering the water on a still morning with the world empty in every direction to the sky. That first entry. Crossing the border of consciousness into, into what?”
-Anne Carson
