“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?”
“She told me she was a writer, and when I left she gave me three books in French, on Proust, Vienna, and magic. It was a sweet thing to do, because our conversations had been mostly in English, and we tried French together like friends failing to be lovers.”
“The truth is that in every annoying, badly done Facebook meme, there is a grain of truth hidden somewhere. Because even the hunter puts down the rifle when the rabbit is served to him on a silver platter by strangers he’s never going to see again.”
“There’s power in not having to care. As Inez Guzmán remarks, the film Oppenheimer can leave New Mexico just as its subject did: apparently without a second thought. But there’s also power—more ambivalent, yes, but also more lasting—that comes with needing to pick up the pieces.”
