"To write is to play jazz: you take a deep breath and roar, releasing a wild mouth
that eats and eats, and eats feverishly without pause or consideration, only
getting hungrier and faster as it moves, thinking nothing but more."
"There are manic writers above me, running back and forth on the balance beam. They giggle at their jokes, their hilarious jokes, their ingenious and godlike writing, there has never BEEN such writing as this! Convinced of their sanity and paramount brilliance, they write like Dr. Hamsterviel, scrawling the world while they scurry. I try not to watch."
“The people lied together in the sun.
There were men and there
were women, and there hung
a collective heaviness on their chests. Without a word, they all knew
it was an ending.”
"I spent my life wondering why everyone moved in slow motion, like they lived in honey while I lived in water. It never occurred to me I'd get stuck too.
In honey. In molasses. In the sick, thick misery of me. But I did. I am."
"I don't think. Why would I? Instead, I waddle around like Patrick Star, handing everyone a flyer of my insane genius.
They ask, Is this the Krusty Krab?
I say, No, this is Patrick. And they
nod their heads, convinced I'm sane,
I have all the answers, my profound
proclamations astound explanations."
"And watching everything pass my window, I can’t help but think Alabama is where everything unwanted goes. There’s a lake, dressed with islands of moss and a once-new brick bridge enshrouded in greenery. There’s a mile of forgotten train cars, blue and green and orange and white, stacked on top of each other, painting our windows for almost half an hour down the track. There’s an old steel mill originally painted yellow, now faded and washed into a wet, stained beige. There’s nothing along the Alabama railway but lost things crying to be found."
"She wasn't beautiful, or smart, or any special sort of kind, but she was it for me. We were it for each other. But in the end it didn't matter, because I was made of helium and she was made of rocks. She, arguably too grounded; I, arguably too wild."
"He writes characters in caricature, non-endings with fantastical details, and draws roadmaps for readers in swirls of cursive that leave us perpetually running toward something we cannot ever catch. In his fictional library, the inhabitants have the same characteristics as typical library-goers, but exaggerated massively, making a forceful but
slovenly woman into a radical feminist, an anxious and strange man
into a psychiatric patient, and a keen student into an obsessive intellectual. He cannot simply write a professor of a language, and he cannot write a nervous professor – he must write a nerve-
addled, anal-retentive professor of a dead language few care to learn.
He pulls his writer’s pencil behind him, dragging it along the
map in one continuous, but inconsistent, swirly mess. He does not
allow for abrupt endings, let alone any endings at all, and instead
keeps the story running, the readers’ breaths never released."
"College is a menagerie of mediocrity. If you’re
in search of true pillars, look instead to the man, penniless, who travels the states in rags; look to
the woman working the latter hours of the 24-hour pharmacy; look to the teenage parents paying off their dilapidated trailer over a long and lonely decade.
They’re deserving of your respect and esteem – they’re the soul of resolute youth, their noses pressed to the sandstone, with steel spirits. It takes more strength to deviate from, than to laze on, the conveyor belt."
"I have a thought. It builds up the shoreline, dragging itself beyond the sand into a bigger and bigger animal when suddenly, it cannot move. Someone else is speaking, loudly with conviction, on the sands of the opposite beach. He deafens the animal and whales it there, leaving it sunken half-through its thought, mouthing instead the words of the
stranger’s warped and distanced mouth."
"Sitting on my uncle’s barstool, I fancied myself an ornament. My feet swung below me like wooden discs at the bottom of string-legs, and my neck, forever swanlike, curved (but did not bend) as I shifted my head’s weight. I imagined myself hanging by a strand of my hair from a tree’s lowest branch – and then, I imagined my uncle’s ragged cat
batting at my toes, keeping me mobile
in immobility, ever-alive in death, like a man’s
final voicemail kept forever on machine."
"She cleansed her face with a thoroughness she otherwise only
afforded her emails. She felt a dirty house did not equal a dirty mind –
then considered the duality of the phrase dirty mind – but that
an unclean face could dirty anything. If she could not keep clear her
most forefront image, her home and work would surely follow.
Her life would become a zit on the face of the earth. Her emails,
she thought, were of a lesser, but nonetheless important, value.
After all, how else would she know her phone bill was due?
After triple-cleansing her face and lathering it with lavishness, she
closed her cabinets and went about her day. It so happened that her
face – on which she spent an exorbitant amount of money – was
relevant in daily work. In times of guilt, when purchasing a luxury
cream or chemical peel, she would say to herself, this is an investment.
And although her job was hardly the reason for her vanity – or perhaps “obsession” was more accurate – it was a sound excuse. Her facial radiance, or lack thereof, affected her success. Homebuyers would
always choose a pretty, glowy realtor over her spotted, wrinkled
counterpart. It was unfair but at the very least, straightforward.
Bottled coffee in hand, she sat on the chair beside her couch. She found
this was critical to the success of her day – sitting on the couch was too familiar to sitting in bed, and she may feel compelled to lie back down.
She turned on her TV and set the remote down. The cable channel
ran the same reruns she’d seen several times, and she was able to
half-listen while half-thinking and drinking.
Suddenly, her bottle was empty, and the rerun had run through."
"To write is to play jazz: you take a deep breath and roar, releasing a wild mouth
that eats and eats, and eats feverishly without pause or consideration, only
getting hungrier and faster as it moves, thinking nothing but more."
"There are manic writers above me, running back and forth on the balance beam. They giggle at their jokes, their hilarious jokes, their ingenious and godlike writing, there has never BEEN such writing as this! Convinced of their sanity and paramount brilliance, they write like Dr. Hamsterviel, scrawling the world while they scurry. I try not to watch."
“The people lied together in the sun.
There were men and there
were women, and there hung
a collective heaviness on their chests. Without a word, they all knew
it was an ending.”
"I spent my life wondering why everyone moved in slow motion, like they lived in honey while I lived in water. It never occurred to me I'd get stuck too.
In honey. In molasses. In the sick, thick misery of me. But I did. I am."
"I don't think. Why would I? Instead, I waddle around like Patrick Star, handing everyone a flyer of my insane genius.
They ask, Is this the Krusty Krab?
I say, No, this is Patrick. And they
nod their heads, convinced I'm sane,
I have all the answers, my profound
proclamations astound explanations."
"And watching everything pass my window, I can’t help but think Alabama is where everything unwanted goes. There’s a lake, dressed with islands of moss and a once-new brick bridge enshrouded in greenery. There’s a mile of forgotten train cars, blue and green and orange and white, stacked on top of each other, painting our windows for almost half an hour down the track. There’s an old steel mill originally painted yellow, now faded and washed into a wet, stained beige. There’s nothing along the Alabama railway but lost things crying to be found."
"She wasn't beautiful, or smart, or any special sort of kind, but she was it for me. We were it for each other. But in the end it didn't matter, because I was made of helium and she was made of rocks. She, arguably too grounded; I, arguably too wild."
"He writes characters in caricature, non-endings with fantastical details, and draws roadmaps for readers in swirls of cursive that leave us perpetually running toward something we cannot ever catch. In his fictional library, the inhabitants have the same characteristics as typical library-goers, but exaggerated massively, making a forceful but
slovenly woman into a radical feminist, an anxious and strange man
into a psychiatric patient, and a keen student into an obsessive intellectual. He cannot simply write a professor of a language, and he cannot write a nervous professor – he must write a nerve-
addled, anal-retentive professor of a dead language few care to learn.
He pulls his writer’s pencil behind him, dragging it along the
map in one continuous, but inconsistent, swirly mess. He does not
allow for abrupt endings, let alone any endings at all, and instead
keeps the story running, the readers’ breaths never released."
"College is a menagerie of mediocrity. If you’re
in search of true pillars, look instead to the man, penniless, who travels the states in rags; look to
the woman working the latter hours of the 24-hour pharmacy; look to the teenage parents paying off their dilapidated trailer over a long and lonely decade.
They’re deserving of your respect and esteem – they’re the soul of resolute youth, their noses pressed to the sandstone, with steel spirits. It takes more strength to deviate from, than to laze on, the conveyor belt."
"I have a thought. It builds up the shoreline, dragging itself beyond the sand into a bigger and bigger animal when suddenly, it cannot move. Someone else is speaking, loudly with conviction, on the sands of the opposite beach. He deafens the animal and whales it there, leaving it sunken half-through its thought, mouthing instead the words of the
stranger’s warped and distanced mouth."
"Sitting on my uncle’s barstool, I fancied myself an ornament. My feet swung below me like wooden discs at the bottom of string-legs, and my neck, forever swanlike, curved (but did not bend) as I shifted my head’s weight. I imagined myself hanging by a strand of my hair from a tree’s lowest branch – and then, I imagined my uncle’s ragged cat
batting at my toes, keeping me mobile
in immobility, ever-alive in death, like a man’s
final voicemail kept forever on machine."
"She cleansed her face with a thoroughness she otherwise only
afforded her emails. She felt a dirty house did not equal a dirty mind –
then considered the duality of the phrase dirty mind – but that
an unclean face could dirty anything. If she could not keep clear her
most forefront image, her home and work would surely follow.
Her life would become a zit on the face of the earth. Her emails,
she thought, were of a lesser, but nonetheless important, value.
After all, how else would she know her phone bill was due?
After triple-cleansing her face and lathering it with lavishness, she
closed her cabinets and went about her day. It so happened that her
face – on which she spent an exorbitant amount of money – was
relevant in daily work. In times of guilt, when purchasing a luxury
cream or chemical peel, she would say to herself, this is an investment.
And although her job was hardly the reason for her vanity – or perhaps “obsession” was more accurate – it was a sound excuse. Her facial radiance, or lack thereof, affected her success. Homebuyers would
always choose a pretty, glowy realtor over her spotted, wrinkled
counterpart. It was unfair but at the very least, straightforward.
Bottled coffee in hand, she sat on the chair beside her couch. She found
this was critical to the success of her day – sitting on the couch was too familiar to sitting in bed, and she may feel compelled to lie back down.
She turned on her TV and set the remote down. The cable channel
ran the same reruns she’d seen several times, and she was able to
half-listen while half-thinking and drinking.
Suddenly, her bottle was empty, and the rerun had run through."
"To write is to play jazz: you take a deep breath and roar, releasing a wild mouth
that eats and eats, and eats feverishly without pause or consideration, only
getting hungrier and faster as it moves, thinking nothing but more."
"There are manic writers above me, running back and forth on the balance beam. They giggle at their jokes, their hilarious jokes, their ingenious and godlike writing, there has never BEEN such writing as this! Convinced of their sanity and paramount brilliance, they write like Dr. Hamsterviel, scrawling the world while they scurry. I try not to watch."
“The people lied together in the sun.
There were men and there
were women, and there hung
a collective heaviness on their chests. Without a word, they all knew
it was an ending.”
"I spent my life wondering why everyone moved in slow motion, like they lived in honey while I lived in water. It never occurred to me I'd get stuck too.
In honey. In molasses. In the sick, thick misery of me. But I did. I am."
"I don't think. Why would I? Instead, I waddle around like Patrick Star, handing everyone a flyer of my insane genius.
They ask, Is this the Krusty Krab?
I say, No, this is Patrick. And they
nod their heads, convinced I'm sane,
I have all the answers, my profound
proclamations astound explanations."
"And watching everything pass my window, I can’t help but think Alabama is where everything unwanted goes. There’s a lake, dressed with islands of moss and a once-new brick bridge enshrouded in greenery. There’s a mile of forgotten train cars, blue and green and orange and white, stacked on top of each other, painting our windows for almost half an hour down the track. There’s an old steel mill originally painted yellow, now faded and washed into a wet, stained beige. There’s nothing along the Alabama railway but lost things crying to be found."
"She wasn't beautiful, or smart, or any special sort of kind, but she was it for me. We were it for each other. But in the end it didn't matter, because I was made of helium and she was made of rocks. She, arguably too grounded; I, arguably too wild."
"He writes characters in caricature, non-endings with fantastical details, and draws roadmaps for readers in swirls of cursive that leave us perpetually running toward something we cannot ever catch. In his fictional library, the inhabitants have the same characteristics as typical library-goers, but exaggerated massively, making a forceful but
slovenly woman into a radical feminist, an anxious and strange man
into a psychiatric patient, and a keen student into an obsessive intellectual. He cannot simply write a professor of a language, and he cannot write a nervous professor – he must write a nerve-
addled, anal-retentive professor of a dead language few care to learn.
He pulls his writer’s pencil behind him, dragging it along the
map in one continuous, but inconsistent, swirly mess. He does not
allow for abrupt endings, let alone any endings at all, and instead
keeps the story running, the readers’ breaths never released."
"College is a menagerie of mediocrity. If you’re
in search of true pillars, look instead to the man, penniless, who travels the states in rags; look to
the woman working the latter hours of the 24-hour pharmacy; look to the teenage parents paying off their dilapidated trailer over a long and lonely decade.
They’re deserving of your respect and esteem – they’re the soul of resolute youth, their noses pressed to the sandstone, with steel spirits. It takes more strength to deviate from, than to laze on, the conveyor belt."
"I have a thought. It builds up the shoreline, dragging itself beyond the sand into a bigger and bigger animal when suddenly, it cannot move. Someone else is speaking, loudly with conviction, on the sands of the opposite beach. He deafens the animal and whales it there, leaving it sunken half-through its thought, mouthing instead the words of the
stranger’s warped and distanced mouth."
"Sitting on my uncle’s barstool, I fancied myself an ornament. My feet swung below me like wooden discs at the bottom of string-legs, and my neck, forever swanlike, curved (but did not bend) as I shifted my head’s weight. I imagined myself hanging by a strand of my hair from a tree’s lowest branch – and then, I imagined my uncle’s ragged cat
batting at my toes, keeping me mobile
in immobility, ever-alive in death, like a man’s
final voicemail kept forever on machine."
"She cleansed her face with a thoroughness she otherwise only
afforded her emails. She felt a dirty house did not equal a dirty mind –
then considered the duality of the phrase dirty mind – but that
an unclean face could dirty anything. If she could not keep clear her
most forefront image, her home and work would surely follow.
Her life would become a zit on the face of the earth. Her emails,
she thought, were of a lesser, but nonetheless important, value.
After all, how else would she know her phone bill was due?
After triple-cleansing her face and lathering it with lavishness, she
closed her cabinets and went about her day. It so happened that her
face – on which she spent an exorbitant amount of money – was
relevant in daily work. In times of guilt, when purchasing a luxury
cream or chemical peel, she would say to herself, this is an investment.
And although her job was hardly the reason for her vanity – or perhaps “obsession” was more accurate – it was a sound excuse. Her facial radiance, or lack thereof, affected her success. Homebuyers would
always choose a pretty, glowy realtor over her spotted, wrinkled
counterpart. It was unfair but at the very least, straightforward.
Bottled coffee in hand, she sat on the chair beside her couch. She found
this was critical to the success of her day – sitting on the couch was too familiar to sitting in bed, and she may feel compelled to lie back down.
She turned on her TV and set the remote down. The cable channel
ran the same reruns she’d seen several times, and she was able to
half-listen while half-thinking and drinking.
Suddenly, her bottle was empty, and the rerun had run through."