Britney > Recent Status Updates

“She was too much and not enough, both in the same instant. Too big and too small; too bright and too dull; too affectionate and not affectionate enough.”

“That is the way of being a woman, to carve away at herself, to fit herself to the task, but, also, to be able to carve herself in a different way, when a different shape is needed.”

“I have learned, lady, that ‘why’ is a dangerous word.”

“What can you say? What do you have but platitudes? We’re sorry for your loss. He was a good boy. We loved him. The words mean nothing, and that’s why you say them. Because you need that fog, that barrier of obscurity, between you and the rest of the world, or your grief will blind you in its rawness, in its brilliance.”

“To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding. To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art. Theater, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what art does. Good or bad, it imagines the insides, the heart of the other, whether that heart is full of light or trapped in darkness.”

“Conditional love is: I will only love you if you love me. Unconditional love is: I will love you even if you do not love me. It’s really easy to love passing strangers unconditionally. They demand nothing of you. It is really hard to love people unconditionally when they can hurt you.”

“It isn’t what you say to people, it’s more important what you do with them. It’s less important what you do with them than the way you’re with them.”

“There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all on your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.”

“Here’s the thing: all of us come from some place of wanting to be seen, understood, accepted, connected. Every single one of us wants to be believed. Artists are often just... louder about it.”

“And to be sure: when you ask, there’s always the possibility of a no on the other side of the request. If we don’t allow for that no, we’re not actually asking, we’re either begging or demanding. But it is the fear of the no that keeps so many of our mouths sewn tightly shut.”

“American culture in particular has instilled in us the bizarre notion that to ask for help amounts to an admission of failure.”

“Everybody struggles with asking. From what I’ve seen, it isn’t so much the act of asking that paralyzes is—it’s what lies beneath: the fear of being vulnerable, the fear of looking needy or weak. The fear of being seen as a burdensome member of the community instead of a productive one. It points, fundamentally, to our separation from one another.”

“I had no right to claim him, I knew. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”

“There’s a place inside us where they can’t reach us, they can’t see. What burns in you burns in all of us.”

“The things we do to girls. Whether we put them on pedestals only to tear them down, or use them for parts and holes, we’re all complicit in this.”

“I don’t blame him for becoming who he was supposed to be. He’s lucky in a way. To be at odds with your nature, what everyone expects from you, is a life of constant struggle.”

“...not only do I forgive myself for writing bad first drafts, I expect myself to write bad first drafts. That’s my baseline assumption. I write my first drafts with the absolute certainty that I’ll either throw them away or that future-me... will correct their many egregious faults later. Either way, it’s not something for present-me to worry about. Filling a blank page is hard enough as it is.” - Lev Grossman

“...if you reward your imagination by writing down your ideas and exploring them, even the slightest little fragment, your imagination will reward you with a more or less continuous stream of ideas. If you turn off or blunt the enthusiasm of your subconscious for engaging in creative play, the stream dries up.”

“What’s important is that some initial irritant, some kind of galvanizing and enduring impulse, combines with the need to communicate, to tell stories... leading to inspiration, then that first story, and all that follows after.”

“Nothing is more essential to a writer than sustaining an inquisitive nature—being actively interested in the world and the people in it. Curiosity reflects a willingness to be disappointed in a search for knowledge. Curiosity sends out a series of queries that exist for their own sake, and curiosity gathers back into itself anything that it finds, transforming what’s found in the process.”

“When someone stops loving you, I wondered, does that mean they never really even started?”

“I strongly believe that the vast majority of people who set out to fight racism, sexism, ableism, and other forms of oppression do so because they really do want to make the world a better place for all people. But if you don’t embrace intersectionality, even if you make progress for some, you will look around one day ad find that you’ve become the oppressor of others.”

“Race was not only created to justify a racially exploitative economic system, it was invented to lock people of color into the bottom of it. Racism in America exists to exclude people of color from opportunity and progress so that there is more profit for others deemed superior.”

“I had started to see myself, and once you start to see yourself, you cannot pretend anymore.”

“Curse this world for what it does to the mothers, for what it does to the daughters. Curse it for making us strong through loss and pain, our hearts torn from our chests again and again. Curse it for forcing us to endure.”

“Words have the power to encourage and inspire but also demean and dehumanize. I know now that epithets are meant to shame us into not being ourselves, to encourage us to perform lies and to be silent about truths.”