Liam Ostermann

“The problem with experiments is that they tell you nothing unless they are competently done, but in controversial science no-one can agree on a criterion of competence.”
― Harry Collins, The Golem: What You Should Know about Science

“[Greens] don't come through the back door the same as other groceries. They don't cower at the bottom of paper bags marked 'Liberty.' They wave over the top. They don't stop to be checked off the receipt. They spill out onto the counter. No going onto shelves with cans in orderly lines like school children waiting for recess. No waiting, sometimes for years beyond the blue sell by date, to be picked up and taken from the shelf. Greens don't stack or stand at attention. They aren't peas to be pushed around. Cans can't contain them. Boxed in they would burst free. Greens are wild. Plunging them into a pot took some doing. Only lobsters fight more. Either way, you have to use your hands. Then, retrieving them requires the longest of my mother's wooden spoons, the one with the burnt end. Swept onto a plate like the seaweed after a storm, greens sit tall, dark, and proud.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“The worst books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays

“Leslie Jamison points out in her essay “Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?”: “If you needed to drink that much, you had to hurt, and drinking and writing were two different responses to that same molten pain: You could numb it, or you could grant it a voice.”
― Daniel Allen Cox, I Felt the End Before It Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah's Witness