Megan

“Even when I’m caught off guard by a lathery shade of peach on the bottom corner of a painting at the Met, as if being reminded that I haven’t seen all the colors, and how there’s more to see, and how one color’s newness can invalidate all of my sureness. To experience infinity and sometimes too the teasing melancholy born from the smallest breakthroughs, like an unanticipated shade of peach, like Buster Keaton smiling, or my friend Doreen’s laugh—how living and opposite of halfhearted it is. Or my beautiful mother growing out her gray, or a lightning bolt’s fractal scarring on a human body, or Fantin-Latour’s hollyhocks, or the sound of someone practicing an instrument—the most sonically earnest sound. Or how staring at ocean water so blue, it leaves me bereft. In postcards, I’ll scribble “So blue!” because, what else?”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere - wherever people are living out their lives. It's a city with a million centers.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Why is it that when a woman is occupied by the voice in her head, or the wear of her day, or the landscape that passes through her eyes like windows on a train, the world assumes she is up for grabs? A vacant stare does not mean vacancy. It's the inverse of invitation, and yet.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“I remember the first time I saw my favorite painting, how its fragile beauty caught my breath. And I thought if the artist had painted just one brushstroke less, he could have told an entirely different story. If he began with a smear of red instead of blue, it could have been a chapter instead of an era.”
― Lang Leav, The Universe of Us