Sep 19, 2017
When Quitting Is the Harder, Better Choice
On learning to let “grit” go.
“Millo is a sax player and ‘Millo’ is short for Armadillo, his full Christian name and species.”
“There are those who fail to realize how deeply Thompson cared about his country. He was a product of it.”
“I am three days aged in Lagos and cry as my fingers turn the first page.”
Inside his sewing box was an old girlfriend’s felt heart, stuck with pins. Throw it out, he says. I don’t.
“The clothing I produce may be simple, but it belongs to me and my body in a way nothing else can.”
There is opportunity in forcibly rewriting a story, in trying out identities that might not feel true at first.
“My cousin’s gift was validation, a connection I hadn’t even realized I was looking for.”
“To be an amateur is to let one’s leisure activities remain indifferent to the whims of capital.”
“Unlike most popular orphan characters, I wasn’t too young to remember my parents.”
Briggs didn’t create the monster lurking under the bed, he just told us it was there.
It is the act of recording all this data that has helped me step away from identifying so strongly with it.
“My reading trajectory hadn’t equipped me with how I saw myself.”
De Maria’s field of lightning . . . Thoreau’s “botany boxes” . . . James Schuyler’s salute to the past
The haunting of Rooney Mara . . . a delivery room turned walk-in closet . . . Ain Gordon’s “Radicals in Miniature”
The stuff we talk about after we finish with our weekly outrage.
I wanted the most information possible and thought I had nothing to fear. Then my mother began to lose her memory.
Zebras and tigers, candy canes and barber poles, bumblebees on awnings!
“Hold a cast-iron skillet and you’ll feel the weight of this history through the handle.”
