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“All Hallows” by Louise Gluck

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perhaps one of my more controversial literary opinions is that—while there are lots and lots of things that really annoy me about sally rooney’s writing—I consider her to be a gifted prose stylist. I think that writing an immensely readable literary novel that resists the young novelist’s tendency towards ostentation and overwriting is much harder than it looks. I know people find her writing style clunky and pedestrian but I actually find it to be the opposite, it’s simple and lucid and clear and it allows the more heightened and emotional passages to shine. Genuinely, I consider her to have an instinctive, almost musical feeling for sentence construction. Overall I am getting a bit tired of that affectless millennial prose style though, all her many inferior rip-offs.

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I had been given this insight into myself, and there was nothing else I could do but say: I want to do this forever.”

“And then, one night, onstage, just like that, it happened. The power of expression was revealed to me, in a way it never had before. I wasn’t even searching for it. That’s the beauty of these things. You’re not looking for it. I’m opening my mouth and I’m understanding somehow that I can speak. Words are coming out, and they’re the words of Strindberg, but I’m saying them as though they’re mine. The world is mine, and my feelings are mine, and they’re going beyond the South Bronx. I left the familiar. I became a part of something larger. I found that there was more to me, a feeling that I belonged to a whole world and not just to one place. I’m thinking to myself, What is this? It feels as though I’m lifting off the ground. I thought, Yes, this is it. It’s right there and I can reach out and touch it. This is out there, and this is what I know now is possible. All of a sudden, in that moment, I was universal. I knew I didn’t have a worry after that. I eat, I don’t eat. I make money, I don’t make money. I’m famous, I’m not famous. It didn’t mean anything anymore. And that’s lucky, in this business, when you don’t care about that. A door was opening, not to a career, not to success or fortune, but to the living spirit of energy. I had been given this insight into myself, and there was nothing else I could do but say: I want to do this forever.”

― Al Pacino, Sonny Boy: A Memoir (Penguin Press, October 15, 2024)

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Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote. Every request for the clarification of the vague, every poke at smug banality, every pen stroke in a document under revision is the antidote… We still have the ability to rise up… keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself.

George Saunders on storytelling and the antidote to media manipulation.

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“I shall never forget the occasion when I was visiting a school as a writer and the whole place suddenly fell into an uproar because the school tomboy - a most splendid Britomart of a girl - had beaten up the school bully. Everything stopped in the staffroom while the teachers debated what to do. They wanted to give the tomboy a prize, but decided reluctantly that they had better punish her and the bully too. They knew that if, as a child, you do pluck up courage to hit the bully, it is an act of true heroism - as great as that of Beowulf in his old age. I remember passing the tomboy, sitting in her special place of punishment opposite the bully. She was blazing with her deed, as if she had actually been touched by a god. And I thought that this confirmed all my theories: a child in her position is open to any heroic myth I care to use; she is inward with folktales; she would feel the force of any magical or divine intervention.”

— Diana Wynne Jones (via joeyvermeil)

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me age 7 watching shrek and hearing the words "i've seen your flag on the marble arch love is not a victory march it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah" for the first time

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Handwritten draft of one of the last poems of Sylvia Plath ‘Sheep in Fog’

The hills step off into whiteness. People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

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This photo made my day. Solidarity with #GiselePelicot and all survivors.

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Can't stop thinking about Justine Kurland's Girl Pictures, to be honest.

"Respite Under a Bridge," 1998.

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To Our Lady Of Solitude by Dennis Scholl

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Paul Goesch. Architectural Composition (Triumphal Arch), 1921.

pen, ink, gouache on wove paper

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Springsteen's Most Anxious Album

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“An object, just by the nature of its physical being, resists possession in a way because it’s an object, you know. You can’t carry around a building obviously. You can’t possess it, in a way. I guess you can own it, like real estate, but that’s short-lived anyway. Music is nebulous. We talk about intellectual property of music, but that’s just politics. I don’t know what that means. That’s why I really believe that the song sustains its own consciousness and is dispossessed of its owner, and then it basically yields to the multitudes of listeners, of consumers, and everyone owns the song. It’s such a relief for me to acknowledge that because I feel far less possessive of my own music, and I feel less earnest and less despairing about its worth, or its value, and more willing to just make it, create it, do my best work possible, and then give it away. We’re born into this world naked and screaming, with no possessions. And we leave in the same way, you know? We can’t take it with us. All we have is our bodies and our souls and that’s it. I don’t even think our bodies are our own. I think that’s just borrowed. So give it away, that’s what I say. Give it away.”

— Sufjan Stevens

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Today I discovered that a couple of TSH characters were based on actual people Donna Tartt knew at Bennington College- amongst them were students Todd O'Neal and Matt Jacobsen, who were the inspiration for Henry and Bunny respectively.

AND JUST—

There's even their own comments about it and it's so funny wait:

Here's the source