There was nothing show-offy about friendships then. Your friends were simply who was around. It didn’t occur to anyone that it could be another way. If you liked your friends, that was okay. If you didn’t like your friends, that was okay, too. We were fine living our mediocre lives. It didn’t occur to anyone that we could have great ones.
From Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour 📚.
Considering one’s life requires a horribly delicate determination, doesn’t it? To get to the truth, to the heart of the trouble. You wake and your dreams disband, in a mid-brain void. At the sink, in the street, other shadows crowd in: dim thugs (they are everywhere) who’d like you never to work anything out.
From Gwendoline Riley’s First Love 📚.
Despite knowing little or nothing of the bloody, mucky realities of land-based lives, people sometimes tell me to be careful not to romanticise the past. On this, I agree. But I tell them to be even more careful of romanticising the future.
From Mark Boyle’s The Way Home 📚.
Home from the library
It has ever been a hindrance to some and a blessing to others that the inbred egoism of the human race blinkers even the perceptive nature. The world revolves, we can agree. But secretly each believes that it revolves around them. Knowing this is a help to the salesperson and the diplomat, but no comfort to the distressed creature who convinces themselves that the machinery of the universe has uniquely conspired to obturate them in the hunt for happiness.
From James Greer’s Bad Eminence 📚.
To gaze upon a childhood home through adult eyes is an act of disenchantment. Great doors grow small. Turrets vanish. Emblems fray. Even if the time spent within any given set of walls was, when the days are reckoned together, brief, it’s in the nature of childhood to guild all surfaces it touches, to magnify things. One should revisit such places only after having done some hard calculations: What are we willing to trade for a clear view of things? What are the chances we’ll regret the bargain later on?
From John Darnielle’s Devil House 📚.
“It’s good for kids to be bored!” After putting this into practice in various ways for a while, it is interesting to note that the result is they aren’t actually bored much at all.
95% of the time they just find something to do that makes them not bored, and 5% of the time they complain a lot and they get to watch a show on the ipad. Either way - not bored!
New notebook on the remarkable: “I love summer”
Just updated my now page 🕦
View out the front door for two weeks
Can’t go to bed, too busy doing cursive practice
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