Katie Richman

“That show really is flawed,” I said. “Mel nailed it.” My friends are always obliging me with ephemera like this—screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers—because I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth? Of course none of these artifacts really amounted to anything; it was like trying to grab smoke by its handle. What handle?”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“Those explorers,” Evelyn said, “were looking for the one thing that didn’t grow, and so they didn’t notice all the things that did grow. It’s an important lesson. If you cling too hard to what you want to see, you miss what’s really there.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“There was so much still to do. There were flowers to collect and transport and food to split up and send home and decisions to be made about the money still to be collected for the cost of the service and the casket and still the matter of thanking everyone who had sent flowers and still the need to notify everyone who would want to know but does not yet know and still the financial affairs and the reading of the will and the going through the house and cataloging and collecting and tossing all the things that needed to be tossed and all those memories what will be found and what should be kept and what should be given away and what to do now that this man, this father, is gone. There were leftovers. There were dirty dishes. There was cleaning, packaging, containing, refrigeration. There was looking under the tables. There was a baby’s bright red rattle, and a money clip, both put into lost and found. There was filing out, climbing up stairs, groaning at achy knees. There was the last person locking the doors, lights out, the quiet hush. There was the walk into the sun, the cold, the day, the season, the year, the next great loss, the next big shock, living and breathing and longing for all the people who were, like Lawrence, no longer there.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“We all impose some coherence—some meaning—on the chaotic events of our existence. We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories, allowing us to live with what we have done—or haven’t done.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder