E > E's Quotes

“but we know in the South that the real purpose of manners is to make life easier for everyone, easier both to keep to oneself and to avoid the uneasy commerce of offense and even insult. Either one shakes hands with someone or one ignores him or one kills him. What else is there?”
― Walker Percy, Lancelot

“It was dimly lit with very few other people—just about my pace of excitement.”
― Marti Olsen Laney, The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World

“Quick note here: Everybody wants you to share your MOST EMBARRASSING MOMENT all the time, and I am here to tell you that you don’t have to. You don’t have to tell it or tweet it or Instagram it. You don’t have to put it in a book or share it with anyone who doesn’t feel safe and protective of your heart.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“You will never climb Career Mountain and get to the top and shout, “I made it!” You will rarely feel done or complete or even successful. Most people I know struggle with that complicated soup of feeling slighted on one hand and like a total fraud on the other. Our ego is a monster that loves to sit at the head of the table, and I have learned that my ego is just as rude and loud and hungry as everyone else’s. It doesn’t matter how much you get; you are left wanting more. Success is filled with MSG.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“Time moves too slow or too fast. But I know a secret. You can control time. You can stop it or stretch it or loop it around. You can travel back and forth by living in the moment and paying attention. Time can be your bitch if you just let go of the “next” and the “before.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we find appealing. We try to see ourselves in them. The same I.D.-relation, however, also means that we try to see them in ourselves. When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it’s less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with. Not only does this cause some angst personally, but the angst increases because, nationally, everybody else is absorbing six-hour doses and identifying with pretty people and valuing prettiness more, too. This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art-form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naïveté. The well-trained viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier. Joe B.’s exhaustive TV-training in how to worry about how he might come across, seem to watching eyes, makes genuine human encounters even scarier. But televisual irony has the solution: further viewing begins to seem almost like required research, lessons in the blank, bored, too-wise expression that Joe must learn how to wear for tomorrow’s excruciating ride on the brightly lit subway, where crowds of blank, bored-looking people have little to look at but each other.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“Tonglen practice (and all meditation practice) is not about later, when you get it all together and you’re this person you really respect. You may be the most violent person in the world—that’s a fine place to start. That’s a very rich place to start—juicy, smelly. You might be the most depressed person in the world, the most addicted person in the world, the most jealous person in the world. You might think that there are no others on the planet who hate themselves as much as you do. All of that is a good place to start. Just where you are—that’s the place to start.”
― Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living

“It’s not such a bad thing to always have something to do, someone to meet, work to complete, trains to catch, beers to drink, marathons to run, classes to attend. By the time some women find someone to whom they’d like to commit and who’d like to commit to them, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that they will have, if they were lucky, soaked in their cities and been wrung dry by them, that those who marry later, after a life lived single, may experience it as the relief of slipping between cool sheets after having been out all night. These same women might have greeted entry into the same institution, had they been pressured to enter it earlier, with the indignation of a child being made to go to bed early as the party raged on downstairs.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“The difficulty that some people have in believing that others might truly relish a life, or even a portion of life, disconnected from traditionally romantic or sexual partnership can merge with a resentment of those who do appear to take pleasure in cultivating their own happiness. As the number of unmarried people steadily rises, threatening the normative supremacy of nuclear family and early bonded hetero patterns, independent life may swiftly get cast as an exercise in selfishness.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“In many ways, the emotional and economic self-sufficiency of unmarried life is more demanding than the state we have long acknowledged as (married) maturity. Being on one’s own means shouldering one’s own burdens in a way that being coupled rarely demands. It means doing everything—making decisions, taking responsibility, paying bills, cleaning the refrigerator—without the benefits of formal partnership. But we’ve still got a lot of hardwired assumptions that the successful female life is measured not in professional achievements or friendships or even satisfying sexual relationships, but by whether you’re legally coupled.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“I’ve often suspected that, as well as being symptomatic of the persistence of unequal divisions of domestic labor and responsibilities, contemporary opting out is also a symptom of the midlife burnout after having lived decades on one’s own in an increasingly work-centered culture.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Single women foot more of their own bills, be they necessities like food and housing, or luxuries like cable and vacations; they pay for their own transportation. They do not enjoy the tax breaks or insurance benefits available to married couples. Sociologist Bella DePaulo has repeatedly pointed out that there are more than one thousand laws that benefit married people over single people.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“This presents another wrinkle. As one nurse wondered, in a marriage class attended by journalist Katherine Boo in “The Marriage Cure,” her 2003 story on pro-marriage initiatives in Oklahoma, “How do you tell if he wants to marry you for the right reasons . . . ? When I wear my white uniform, guys around here know I’m working and chase me down the street to get their hands on my paycheck.”59”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“As journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has sensibly observed, “human beings are pretty logical and generally savvy about identifying their interests. Despite what we’ve heard, women tend to be human beings and if they are less likely to marry today, it is probably that they have decided that marriage doesn’t advance their interests as much as it once did.”60”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“The message that an active sex life was not simply a new freedom but, in fact, an imperative, a form of validating the worth of young women, has been one of the more convoluted messages to emerge in the century since Balch objected to the notion that sex had been made to mean too much.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Parody was one way Americans safely digested their class politics.”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“Stories of unity tamp down our discontents and mask even our most palpable divisions. And when these divisions are class based, as they almost always are, a pronounced form of amnesia sets in. Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not supposed to be important in our history. It is not who we are.”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“Meanwhile, if the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine—but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Political experts had difficulty anticipating the USSR’s collapse, Tetlock found, because a prediction that not only forecast the regime’s demise but also understood the reasons for it required different strands of argument to be woven together. There was nothing inherently contradictory about these ideas, but they tended to emanate from people on different sides of the political spectrum,11 and scholars firmly entrenched in one ideological camp were unlikely to have embraced them both.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Alcoholics build defenses like the Dutch build dikes. I spent the first twelve years or so of my married life assuring myself that I “just liked to drink.” I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers—common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Messrs. Strunk and White don’t speculate as to why so many writers are attracted to passive verbs, but I’m willing to; I think timid writers like them for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. There is no troublesome action to contend with; the subject just has to close its eyes and think of England, to paraphrase Queen Victoria. I think unsure writers also feel the passive voice somehow lends their work authority, perhaps even a quality of majesty. If you find instruction manuals and lawyers’ torts majestic, I guess it does.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy—“I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand”—but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing—of being flattened, in fact—is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“That’s no good. If there’s no joy in it, it’s just no good. It’s best to go on to some other area, where the deposits of talent may be richer and the fun quotient higher.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Although I don’t know for sure, I’d bet my dog and lot that John Grisham never worked for the mob. All of that is total fabrication (and total fabrication is the fiction-writer’s purest delight). He was once a young lawyer, though, and he has clearly forgotten none of the struggle. Nor has he forgotten the location of the various financial pitfalls and honeytraps that make the field of corporate law so difficult. Using plainspun humor as a brilliant counterpoint and never substituting cant for story, he sketches a world of Darwinian struggle where all the savages wear three-piece suits. And—here’s the good part—this is a world impossible not to believe. Grisham has been there, spied out the land and the enemy positions, and brought back a full report. He told the truth of what he knew, and for that if nothing else, he deserves every buck The Firm made.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft