The truth is often not that hard to find -- Patti Smith

Paper on ground:

You told me you USED to think he was cute!

Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked.

-- Jerome K. Jerome

Geoff Dyer Suffering

"Writers suffer more from the flu than other people and I suffer more from the flu than other writers."


"Life is bearable even when it is unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it."

from "Out of Sheer Rage"

Annals of the Law

Appellant contends that three characteristics of the will undermine the conclusion that the document is testamentary. First, he asserts that the title "Last Will Etc. or What?" creates an ambiguity and implies that the decedent was unaware of what he was writing.

Estate of Williams (2007)155 Cal.App.4th 197, 212.

And --

Most people don't want what they want

More Dyer

How can you know anything about literature if all you've done is read books?

Geoff Dyer and Deconstruction

In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded on deconstructing it.

"As if salaciously self-serving isn't the very soul of American noir."

-- Joyce Carol Oates, responding to James Ellroy's self-criticism regarding "My Dark Places."

Justice Breyer, playing the little old man

"I had to have a tweeting thing because I was very interested in the Iranian revolution, remember when they just had this uprising a little over a year ago. … I sat there fascinated because you could look through the tweeting and see what was going on. The only way you could do that was go through the tweet or the tweeter."

from Dahlia Lithwick in Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2290726/

Unpromising Beginning to Humorous Story

"Let me describe some funny situations in which one of my readers acted as an Empirical Reader rather than a Model Reader."

Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist

"It's almost two years. What is it, April. April, May, June, July. In three
months it will be two years. If I propose, it'll be another year until. It'll be a year 'til I propose. Then a year after that. So that'll be okay."

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I'll stop.