#z

I'm watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don't deserve them. Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel. ↗

— Isaac Marion

#painting

I start reading every Elizabeth Wurtzel essay with optimism, like maybe finally she put her talent to writing about something than herself, and by the end of paragraph three that optimism has fled. So maybe you know Wurtzel has written an essay for New York Magazine? Probably you know, because for whatever reason, Wurtzel provokes a deep need in people to talk about how much they hate Wurtzel. So the comments are hundreds deep, Twitter is ablaze, and here I am, writing this blog post. And actually, she reminds me of Mary MacLane. She was a 19-year-old girl who wrote a memoir called I Await the Devil’s Coming in 1901 and it was an instant success. I wrote the introduction to the upcoming reissue, and there I talk about what a deeply interesting book it was. Not only “for its time,” but also it’s just kind of visceral and nasty and snarling, yet elegantly written. I kept thinking about MacLane, after the introduction got handed in and things went off to press. But this time, it wasn’t her writing that interested me, it was the way she never wrote anything very interesting ever again. She got stunted, somehow, winning all of that acclaim for being a young, sour thing. And I wondered if it was the fame that stunted her, because she spent the rest of her career spitting out copies of the memoir that made her famous. And it worked, until it didn’t. ↗

— Jenna Crispin

#mary-maclane #twitter

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#f-scott-fitzgerald #letter #on-writing #storytelling #storytelling

Aphros nodded, a glint of pride in his eyes. “We have trained all the famous mer-heroes! Name a famous mer-hero, and we have trained him or her!” “Oh, sure,” Leo said. “Like…um, the Little Mermaid?” Aphros frowned. “Who? No! Like Triton, Glaucus, Weissmuller, and Bill!” “Oh. ”Leo had no idea who any of those people were. “You trained Bill? Impressive. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#hero-training #heroes #heroes-of-olympus #leo-valdez #mermaids

I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner? ↗

— Frank Zappa

#floss #lyrics #teeth #zappa #censorship

Ich berichte hier von illusorischen Bibliothek totgeborener, totgeschwiegener oder scheintoter Bücher, die im Keimen oder Erscheinen begriffen waren zu der Zeit, als ich anfing ins Caféhaus zu gehen. Ich berichte von dem Schrifttum eines untergegangenen Kulturreiches. ↗

— Walter Mehring

#censorship

The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence. ↗

— John Green

#rules #rules

Hazel squinted. "How far?" "Just over the river and through the woods." Percy raised an eyebrow. "Seriously? To Grandmother's house we go?" Frank cleared his throat. "Yeah, anyway. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#hazel #heroes #jackson #neptune #olympians

Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic. ↗

— Imre Lakatos

#besides #characterized #heuristic #negative #positive

Not all diseases come from bacteria and viruses, Professor. The worst often come from things you cannot see under a microscope. This plant is infested with an aggressive strain of such invisible germs. ↗

— Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

#flame-lily #great-zimbabwe #hangman #mystrey #parnormal