Who Is Maud Dixon?

by Alexandra Andrews

wore her feminism the same way she’d probably once worn her private school uniform—casually, without thinking too much about it, but committedly.

Ezra Pound was a fascist, but he still wrote some beautiful fucking sentences.”

“Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down,”

“You shouldn’t have to try to like things,” Florence insisted. “It’s like people who force themselves to finish a book they’re not enjoying. Just close it! Go find another story!”

All she had to do was become a writer, and her alienation would magically transform into evidence of brilliance rather than a source of shame.

She tried on moods and personalities like outfits. One day she was interested in ruthlessness. The next, she wanted to be an object of adoration.

There’s real power in being an outsider. You see things more clearly.”

I’ve never found one…fascinating in the way I find women fascinating. Men are blunt objects. There’s no nuance there.

“Middle categories are for middling people,”

“Bene vixit, bene qui latuit.” Florence nodded then said, “Sorry, what?” “It’s Latin, from Ovid. It means, ‘He lives well who is well hidden.’”

People think they want the truth but they’re always disappointed. It is invariably less interesting than the mystery.

If I mess up, I mess up. I find that people in general are way too scared of making mistakes. Sure, make a plan and do some research, but when it’s time to act, my god, just act.”

The human mind wasn’t built to assimilate so much suffering. It was designed to produce just enough empathy to cover its own little community.

My community is me. And I don’t feel accountable to anyone outside of it—human,

Change is never a smooth curve; it comes in leaps and jolts, plateaus and remissions. And in the periods after an old identity fades away but before a new one is fully installed, there is a certain sense of impunity. As if nothing quite matters. You are not quite yourself. You’re not quite anyone.

She no longer wanted to be hampered by a petty obsession with rules. Something about it seemed vaguely low-class and pathetic to her now.

“Panic is a waste of energy,

“If you spend your life looking for fairness you’ll be disappointed. Fairness doesn’t exist. And if it did, it would be boring. It would leave no room for the unexpected. But if you search for greatness—for beauty, for art, for transcendence—those are where the rewards are. That is what makes life worth living.”

You only need to give one or two details about a character’s physical appearance. It’s all the reader needs to build an image in her mind. Anything more is a distraction.

Death is the most transformative event in anyone’s existence, she thought, yet once it has happened, it doesn’t matter to that person anymore. There’s no person left. At that point, any significance it has fragments and scatters. Its impact is diffused among the survivors.

it’s so insignificant. It’s just, like, eighty years of driving to the grocery store and back. Can’t we aim for something higher?”

I’m not saying that has to be everyone’s purpose. I think it’s awesome that you actually think about this stuff and you’ve found your passion. All I’m saying is that no one’s path is intrinsically better or worse than anyone else’s,

Disdain, after all, has always been a useful stepping-stone to confidence,

Emotional power, psychological power—that was her currency.

She’d always needed to retreat into solitude after spending a few hours in anyone else’s company.

the smell of the binding, the roughness of the pages—but they were nothing compared to the magnitude of what was inside them.

There are some emotions, like rage and lust, that seem to speed up time. But shock creates a moment of stasis, a pocket of time outside the passing seconds, during which the mind has to veer off the neural pathway it has just been traveling down in order to start hacking away at a new one.

“Sweet is just a polite way of saying dull.”

total isolation was its own form of vulnerability. It was dangerous to have nobody. Somebody needed to notice if you went missing.