The sole duty of a writer is to minister to his readers: to liberate them from inexactitude out of respect for the mysterious and touching pact of loyalty that they make with books.
- Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death
What is it about nudity, in theory the great equalizer, that excites us? In their naked state, only monsters should turn us on, and yet it's the very sameness of our nakedness that we find arousing.
Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death
Despair can function as an analgesic, numbing us to our shared responsibility for this crisis in progress. It can be almost comforting to yield to despair, in the face of vocabulary like 'growing wealth disparity,' and 'climbing housing costs,' which evoke a sense of inertial forces, ungovernable and unstoppable as the shifting of tectonic plates, continental drift. Or, for an even uglier metaphor, the runaway growth of subdividing cancer cells. In Portland, for example, journalists have been writing about the homeless camps 'mushrooming' throughout the urban woods and public plazas of downtown Portland—a word I’ve used myself to describe the scene, as if the proliferation of human beings sleeping under tarps and cardboard were the result of unusually heavy rains. But just like 'natural' disasters in the Anthropocene, housing bubbles and market crashes have human authors.
Karen Russell at @lithub with a frankly stunning essay on America’s housing crisis. It’s being anthologized in Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation from OR Books.
The simple business of the sentence and the paragraph---the substance of fiction---in war or in peace seems to me not to be a particularly different task, no matter what the society.
Colm Tóibín in conversation with Chris Abani @bombmagazine
The human face is only capable of two or three real expressions, and they leave their mark.
Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
Arundhati Roy (character), The God of Small Things
It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined.
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Maybe the most difficult, most important thing anyone could do for anyone else was to leave him alone; it was perhaps the only gratuitous act, the act of love.
Joan Didion, Run River
As an ancient proverb says, three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works. And aches.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Those whom you cannot love you should, rather, fear.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (character)
There [is] a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
It was the builder, after all, and not the building which was remarkable.
Evan S. Connell, Mrs. Bridge
One thing about everybody dying is that you don’t have to use the designated runway.
Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.
Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
I sat in the hall and wrote letters and noticed how sad dance-music has sounded ever since the war began.
Rebecca West, The Return of the Solider
There is a kind of sport to be had In the consideration of someone else's fate. --Suzan-Lori Parks, Father Comes Home From The Wars