Leah W

“I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they’re pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“A famous university in theory might sound exciting, but in reality it’s just a bunch of buildings, and often some droopy balloons hanging from an iron banister, and a loose gathering of people that might be a poorly attended Falun Gong liberation protest, or some students playing Assassin.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“Cockroaches were a problem, too, and to me the people who invented Combat, the little black roach-trapping contraption, are urban folk heroes.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“What a sad paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze the path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666