Sarah Lynn Knowles

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“The church revealed itself to me then. Creaking wood planks, peeling and hot. Trinity Prism in the rafters, long in the face. The cheap common glitter, no specimen of heaven. Vern in a polyester robe fraying at the edges. I saw everything exactly as it was, dark and dirty, the people covered in filth, farm-beaten and raw, their deadened searching eyes, desperation. And the girls. The girls of blood, all full up like me.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“Season food with the proper amount of salt at the proper moment; choose the optimal medium of fat to convey the flavor of your ingredients; balance and animate those ingredients with acid; apply the right type and quantity of heat for the proper amount of time—do all this and you will turn out vibrant and beautiful food, with or without a recipe.”
― Samin Nosrat, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

“Have you ever tried to demarcate the hours between the moment you thought you'd never fall asleep and the instant after opening your eyes, your bedroom flooded with the befuddling, sugary pink of dawn? Between point A and point B you exist, you are alive, your breath slowing, your body temperature dropping, the shadows cast by your furniture elongating and shrinking as the moon revolves through the sky above your flimsy house, if that's even where you really are. Every night, anything could happen, and you would never be the wiser. What I'm trying to say is that day, I learned that time doesn't belong to you. All you have is what you remember. A fraction; less.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena