“By the eighth day words had begun to fail me. I thought in silent images. It was hot. We ate greedily, excessively, grilled meat on the bone, whole fish smiling up from the table, savory noodles prepared in cold sesame sauce with fresh cucumber. I sat around for hours after lunch feeling uncomfortably full.”
“You didn’t talk to me today. And I suppose I didn’t say anything either. So I searched for an excuse for you to remember me, wondering what I could possibly ask.”
“What about sex reduces the male brain to a pile of mush? Are these the leaders of the next generation? The very best of our future investment bankers and Raytheon interns? We’re doomed.”
“I feel yucky, I said. I licked a fucking banana. We’ve all been there, my friend said, but I wasn’t so sure that he could relate to using a banana as a sensuous prop. I ate the banana since it was peeled already.”
“Now that it’s mainstream, it’s hard for me to reconcile the subcultural nature of fanfiction and fan spaces with its ever-increasing visibility. For almost a decade, I’ve been so entrenched in fan culture that it surprises me when someone doesn’t know what Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics entail.”
“The people she invented shared none of her problems, none of her responsibilities. She gave them their own small disasters, which were different from her own and therefore interesting, instead of just pathetic. She was deeply, stupidly jealous of them.”
“Gogol advocated that we do not need to reject value-judgements, but rather understand all art as part of a grander movement; great art is the product of labor and reflection, vision and passion, building off the works that precede it.”
“For Smith, poet and painter William Blake exemplified this approach to life. She remarked: ‘Despite the fact he had no proof from the world he was worth anything—he would have gotten 4 likes [on Instagram]—he did his work.’”
“I might survive, and what if I do? What if I swim through the waters and eat and hide from those raiders? And, god, what if I have to drink my own urine?”
