“Famously, the trick to good writing is bleeding onto the page.“
© 2018 Emilie Pine, Notes to self.
Category: English
Eye contact
”We rarely make eye contact for the fear of tears we’ll see.”
© 2018 Emilie Pine, Notes to self.
Mother Nature
”The one person I confide in is the GP, until she starts talking about “Mother Nature” and how I need to “let nature take its course.” This seems inestimably stupid to me and I retort that no one thinks it’s a good idea to let nature take its course when someone has cancer.”
© 2018 Emilie Pine, Notes to self.
Done
”I am done living and writing that story. This is the moment that we get to look around, find our own balance, and enjoy the view from where we are.”
© 2018 Emilie Pine, Notes to self.
How I feel at (almost) forty years.
Strauss-Kahn
”The New York Times reported it this way: “As the impact of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s predicament hit home, others, including some in the news media, began to reveal accounts, long suppressed or anonymous, of what they called Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s previously predatory behavior toward women and his aggressive sexual pursuit of them, from students and journalists to subordinates.”
In other words, he created an atmosphere that was uncomfortable or dangerous for women, which would be one thing if he were working in, say, a small office. But that a man who controls some part of the fate of the world apparently devoted his energies to generating fear, misery, and injustice around him says something about the shape of our world and the values of the nations and institutions that tolerated his behavior and that of men like him.”
© 2014 Rebecca Solnit, Men explain things to me.
The strongest essay in the book!
Boring old gender wars
“My houseguest, the brilliant theorist and activist Marina Sitrin, insisted that I had to write it down because people like her younger sister Sam needed to read it. Young women, she said, needed to know that being belittled wasn’t the result of their own secret failings; it was the boring old gender wars, and it happened to most of us who were female at some point or other.”
© 2014 Rebecca Solnit, Men explain things to me.
Presumptions
“It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”
© 2014 Rebecca Solnit, Men explain things to me.
Suffering
”Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn’t sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for. All I knew was that it carried a kind of honour, if you survived it, and left you in a relationship to the truth that seemed closer, but that in fact might have been identical to the truthfulness of staying in one place.”
© 2018 Rachel Cusk, Kudos.
Loss of instinct
”In England, I said, people liked to live in old houses that had been thoroughly refurbished with modern conveniences, and I wondered whether the same principle might be applied to novels; and if so, whether the blunting loss or loss of our own instinct for beauty was responsible for it.”
© 2018 Rachel Cusk, Kudos.
Neither future nor past
“I noticed that everyone there was around the same age as the married couple, and the absence of anyone older or younger made it seem as though these events were bound neither to the future nor the past, and that no one was entirely certain whether it was freedom or irresponsibility that had untethered them.”
© 2018 Rachel Cusk, Kudos.
Writer's Debris 