browsery

What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.

I beg of you, don’t ask me to choose between ‘Hangover’ II and III. That would be like asking a mother to choose between her children, assuming she hated her children, never wanted to see them again and wished they’d never been born in the first place.

Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. That’s at the highest level, of course. Your aim should be to improve your craft.

For me, saying “I am married now” is like saying “I am lucky now.” I stumbled and crashed my way into the literal arms of something I never quite believed in before: my soul mate. A man who frequently smells like cheeseburgers and makes me laugh hard every day and makes me want to be worthy of being his husband.

All last night I dreamed of Godzilla. In the thunder shaking the sky and fire flashing in intermittent warnings like danger signals from the heavens, Godzilla roared outside my window, destroying what I hold dear. Godzilla in my dreams devastating armies. Godzilla in my dreams changing geography, vaporizing oceans and leveling mountains and toppling buildings. Godzilla destroying vast swatches of land, like tornados in Western Arkansas where I once lived, or the cataclysms crawling from the earth in the Book of Revelations. Godzilla decimating barren hamlets in the mountains, and war-torn cities in the deserts. Godzilla some unstoppable machine full of atomic energy and blasts of fire, either descended from on high or else risen from the ocean, deus ex machina, god in a machine, as if the world were a great tragedy. Godzilla in my dream not Godzilla at all but a metaphor, something the audience understands only as a vague warning.

[T]hat’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two…

When “new normal” is ushered in, where does “old normal” go?

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) May 22, 2013