Rachael

“If I seem cagey, it is because I am not a liar and hate being considered one, due to an accident of craft. But also, if I tell you the idea, and the description disappoints you, the novel can be lost.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“The most popular sour cherry is the Montmorency. Studies show that Montmorency cherries can reduce pain and inflammation, including pain caused by strenuous exercise. In 2009, a group of fifty-seven male and female runners took part in a study conducted by the Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine. The participants were scheduled to compete in Oregon’s Hood to Coast Relay race, a challenging two-hundred-mile course that traverses two mountain ranges. The runners in one group drank two glasses of Montmorency cherry juice—one before the race began and one during the race. The volunteers in the other group consumed an equal amount of a cherry-flavored drink. When the race was over, the runners who drank the real cherry juice reported significantly less pain.”
― Jo Robinson, Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health

“Carpe diem' doesn't mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible. 'Carpe diem' means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin servies. No R. Very different piece of advice. What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things--so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant--pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.”
― Nicholson Baker, La mezzanine