Mercury Retrograde Quotes

“it seems kind of insane to think that letting the voices of the Internet scribble all over everything would be anything other than an endless mandala of swastikas and jizz, but that’s how optimistic I was at the time.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“It’s all very Mercury Retrograde. I heard Paula in HR was going crazy because Seth wasn’t returning her messages, and she thought she was going to get fired. But then it turned out that she was accidentally texting a drug dealer with the same name.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“He thinks you are the girl with the dragon tattoo,” she told me once, which puzzled me. Years later, I understood what she meant.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“Being around Marcus made me feel like I was on drugs, like anything I said could be correct, like the air between my assertions and reality was buoy-ant, thin, and whooshing away.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“Nina was standing there stooped like a drowned little cherub, her whirlsiness extinguished, irritated and wry.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“was telling her what our old professor said in a recent talk, critiquing the idea of empathy. “Think about it,” they said, “when you take a walk in someone else’s shoes, you’ve taken their shoes!”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“was a woman, despite an early groping by a boss, cruelty from male relatives, and a host of misogynistic boyfriends. You need pattern recognition to see all this as misogyny, and I didn’t have the pattern recognition working right, then. I was shielded from this recognition by my collective”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“She was shaking her hand too, but caught my eyes, and her gaze was full of darkness.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“At first, I liked that my mental illness was considered a mark of belonging. I thought I was destigmatizing something by describing my new medication to any coworker who asked; now I’m not so sure. Maybe it was brave, weird, exhibitionist, socially suicidal, or all of the above. Maybe I just felt scared and alone, and thought that talking about it would make me feel less disconnected and better understood.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“cool. I liked that Piet understood that doing the memes was not about purposefully blanding yourself due to a deep cynicism about human individuality; rather it came from hopefulness about the tastes and desires of large swaths of humanity, and recognition that we were all deep down totally weird freaks who only sometimes felt at home with other people.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“It’s kind of like handing a young high school graduate in Ray Bans a sports car he’s about to crash and watching his energy spike, maybe you can poke a straw in him and drink some.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“My phone was dead. I put it inside the front waistband of my jeans, where the dual force of my denim and thong pressed a cold rectangle into my flesh. Pressing my device against my skin so it would warm up enough to turn on and yield the maps to my next destination in inscrutable, freezing Munich. I was charging my phone with my body, getting myself unlost.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“a special form of humor that sometimes made me sigh, or shudder.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“i.e. to disprove specialness or make a new model, a generational model that got away from it – but I also wanted to be special for making the meme. I wanted zero authorship and to be the one true author, all at the same time.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“Could you be trolling and believe in it at the same time?”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“as if we were there simply to feed the Internet back at itself, make them eat it, the hypocrisy of celebrating difference.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“from within me came highs of excitement, a sleep deficit, a pervasive hum of anxiety.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“and actually, that distance is what I sometimes miss: the foggy, scrim-bound, protected feeling”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“I thought having an unpublished novel in the drawer to be the ultimate unbearable failure. I had been trained to avoid humiliation at all costs.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde

“Slow memes could be viral entities that reproduced themselves through language. But instead of quickly reaching a hot tipping point, they would replicate slowly and insidiously over a long period.”
― Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde