“There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry that it may be true in gleams and fragments. Then its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that it must be true.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The change is small, but it’s enough to increase the melt rate on the underside of these glaciers. Floating ice shelves, which grow like fingernails where the glaciers meet the ocean, are particularly vulnerable to melting from below.”
-Jeff Goodell
“Outdoor meetings in America are rare, their atmosphere always surcharged with impending clashes between the audience and the police. Not so in England. Here the right to assemble constantly in the open is an institution. It has become a British habit, like bacon for breakfast.”
-Emma Goldman
“A cloud of intense literary ambition hung over the house like a stormy little micro-climate. “
-Claire Dederer
-Nicolette Bethel
“I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.”
-Anne Lamott
“It is remembering how powerful the word ‘system’ made us grad students feel, how it tricked us into imagining locations and targets, pillars we could smash, wires we could cut. It is arriving at the proper sense of wonder at the atmosphere we once called ‘the system.’ It is being told over the phone that you have won an award and finally getting that metaphor (‘the system’), finally grasping, after all these years, that change is more cunning than we were prepared for, that change is as gentle as the snow falling faintly onto the surface of the lake outside while we wait for the server to bring the bill.”
– Kevin Birmingham
“My kids would have to dive in, live through the agony, and come out the other side. They’d have to learn to lie on the lawn watching ants scale the grass blades; they’d have to linger, digits pruning, in the bathtub; they’d have to stop, to be still, and then to wait, and wait, and wait, allowing time to fatten around them, like a dewdrop on the tip of a leaf. And then, only then, who know what they might imagine or invent?”
– Claire Messud
“I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.”
– Rebecca Solnit
The Simile Museum 