Jonathan Maxen

“I laughed when she said “utilize” and she said “what?” and I said “just utilize, it’s a meaningless word” and then she tried to tell me that it “communicated” something different from the word “use” and the way she looked at me, chuckling, glancing over at James like “oh, how sweet, it tried to talk,” made me so mad that I might have said, maybe, something along the lines of “yeah, it communicates something, it’s a real first-gen-college-grad kind of word, like your parents are small-town conservative Christians who didn’t have any books in the house, and you’re self-conscious about your upbringing so you want to stand out by using elitist intellectual language, but you don’t actually know any long words, so you just truss up the word ‘use’ for no fucking reason other than to try to make people feel like you’re the one with the big mental dick, even though ‘utilize’ is basically just administrative jargon and completely déclassé to them that knows.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Poppy tells a story about a friend of hers who used to coach coed youth soccer on weekends. Her friend’s team of six-year-olds had decided to call themselves “The Mommies and the Daddies.” “Which friend?” I ask. “Anna, old roommate Anna?” “Actually,” Poppy says, “it’s not a story from a friend. It’s just a funny tweet I saw.”
― Alexandra Tanner, Worry

“I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again