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“This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man. I was pretending not to worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.”

“Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you be become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium of restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.”

"Katharine understood her brand of editing to be most successful when least visible. Indeed, she might have said that her legacy is precisely the absence of a discernible pattern among the authors she created [.]"

“She knew perfectly well who she was… and she took care to make her weight felt at every turn.”

Me 🤝 Tina Fey: offbeat, business class-assed, and exhausted

“As if trying her best to mend a broken friendship from childhood, she immersed herself in books, day and night, never leaving their side. It didn’t take long for their treasured relationship to rekindle. The books welcomed her back with open arms without judging the person she’d become, and accepted her for who she was.”

He’s a 10 but his name is Richard hahaha

If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself – which, because it’s inevitable, means nothing.

“That is why a woman is always more affected by compliments about her looks than by those about her mind – for she has inner certainties about her mind, those which everybody has and which therefore prove nothing.”

There is never any end to Paris. […] Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

After writing a story I always felt empty and both sad and happy, as though I made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not truly know how good it was until I read it over the next day.

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

“Books are food,” wrote English critic Holbrook Jackson, “libraries so many dishes of meat, served out for several palates… We eat them from love or necessity, as other food, but most from love.”

The common reader, [according to Virginia Woolf], “differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole.”

“I think it takes two people to hurt you,” I said. “The one who does it and the one who tells you.”

“Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; […] but in all honesty, a cookbook is something you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed. The purpose is […] to simply baste our rested brains with common sense, and with the prospect of common pleasures to come.”

Wow I finally know exactly what “fire” and “all day” means in a professional kitchen