Grace McDonough

“To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character and the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, 8 million stories in the naked city; 8 million stories and all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city's actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry

“Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things just be as they are? I never thought to analyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“One tiny insight is not enough. But it's a start. It gives me confidence. I want this sudden confidence to stay. To go on and on, spreading and changing and growing to become something beautiful, strong, clear, enduring . . . something tells me if I continue to turn my insights into adjectives I'll turn into a criminal. I'll steal the splendor of this moment and commit it to a long, sorry sentence. I'll murder people and bury them in gorgeous metaphors. I'll mutilate events and objects, cut and arrange everything into pretty patterns. Into spectacular empty images.”
― Constance De Jong, Modern Love