Caroline Smith

“I swore when I got into this poem I would convert
this sorrow into some kind of honey with the little musics
I can sometimes make with these scribbled artifacts
of our desolation.”
― Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

“It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
― Joan Didion