“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board: I’m on a boat!”
— Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
“All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; and then there are families with a libertarian guy who vapes and does something with computers and is this close to never being invited to Thanksgiving again after he dismantled his sister-in-law’s iPad last year and was unable to piece it back together, despite having claimed just minutes before that anybody could build their own smart technology with nothing more than the most rudimentary understanding of electronics and a Bitcoin or two with which to purchase the appropriate parts.”
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
*Maximum realizing my brothers and I should’ve gotten extra whip and caramel drizzle on our Frappuccinos voice* “We wanted more.”
— Justin Torres, We the Animals
“You better not tell nobody, not even via cryptic subtweet.”
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
“See the child stomping dirty little shoes on the fancy restaurant banquet, the child throwing celery sticks into a public fountain (mom forgot that the child doesn’t like celery so it’s completely her fault and she hopes the child will accept her apology), the child who—when confronted by an authority figure — asks if they even realize that the child’s father is a lifestyle blogger with over 1,500 page views per day and the child’s mother is one of the top 100 sellers of recycled materials home accents on all of Etsy, the child who excels both academically and socially as the sole pupil in a K-12 homeschool environment with a play-based curriculum, the child who is the most special child in all the world regardless of the stupid police and mean judge’s assertions that because the child is twenty-nine years old the child will be prosecuted as an adult — or, actually, don’t see the child, just look at your phone or bask in on your superiority to those fascistic so-called parents habitually abusing their poor children using ‘boundaries,’ ‘rules,’ and ‘consequences,’ or simply forget your child’s existence altogether and devote yourself 100% to manifesting your bliss, and most importantly congratulate yourself: you’ve now mastered free-range parenting.”
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
“Some real things have happened lately, I’m shook.”
— Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, it totally depends on the Instagram filter.”
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
“A woman has written yet another story that is not interesting, though it has a hurricane in it, and a hurricane usually promises to be interesting — and yet, meh.”
— Lydia Davis, “The Center of the Storm”
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a runway model in her early-to-mid-twenties aiming to segue into film stardom, MUST BE ABLE TO HOST (total disclosure: the man is technically married, but his wife is estranged, living in the Malibu home doing acro-yoga and screwing her sobriety coach, but occasionally she appears without warning at the Hamptons, Manhattan, and Antigua properties, between which the man divides his time, hoping to catch him cheating so she can file for divorce and walk away with everything), absolutely no smoking, STIs, drama.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
“Call me Ish.”
— Herman Mellville, Moby-Dick
“Nobody died that year, Michelle Obama had yet to debut her thigh-high gold Balenciagas, now everyone is literally deceased.”
— Renata Adler, Speedboat