Tasha

“Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses--pretty but designed to SLOW women down.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“…if there’s one thing that novelists love to talk about, it’s how to make things real when, obviously, they are not. This in turn leads naturally into something novelists like to talk about even more: the terrible struggle of writing itself. (My favourite line about writers: “Writers are people who find writing more difficult than other people.”) Now we’re really getting going. Metaphors rise from the table like disturbed lepidoptera. Writing a novel is like attempting to solve an extremely complicated maths equation, which seeks to represent reality, and through which you are trying to lead the public without them ever getting wind that said equation is, in fact, impossible to solve or that, actually, it might not represent reality at all. We are getting carried away. Deciding to write a novel is like visiting an obscure, half-forgotten and slowly-evaporating planet entirely comprised of swimming pools and deciding that what is needed is… yes, another swimming pool! But, for obscure reasons, a swimming pool that must be built single-handedly from scratch and then filled using only a syringe.”
― Edward Doxc

“Goblin tea resembles a nice cup of Earl Grey in much the same way that a catfish resembles the common tabby. They share a name, but one is a nice thing to curl up with on a rainy afternoon, and the other is found in the muck at the bottom of polluted rivers and has bits of debris sticking to it.”
― T. Kingfisher

“Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or—kindest of all—goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.”
― Shirley Jackson, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings