Maria Potoroczyn

as far as you can manage it, you should make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.

The most important question you can ask yourself, if you don’t know your question already, is “What question am I trying to answer?” Like with your life. This one actually should have, if not an answer, at least a working hypothesis. But since the answer is a question, we’ll let it slide.

We all think what we want is answers. We don’t, actually. Answers are dead things. Questions are animating. What we want is great questions.

By the time a question gets its answer, all of the juice has been squeezed. The answer is the pulp and pith. Answers are static things. Questions are kinetic.

I believe parenting is an act of witness. All children deserve to be seen for who they are and called into their unique personhood

When we recognize true taste, we are recognizing that alchemic combination of skill and soul.

Taste requires originality. It invokes an aspirational authenticity. Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from ... See more

Taste comes in lanes. To quote Susan Sontag again, “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good vis... See more

A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how t... See more

The day passed slowly at first — warm sun on the back patio and a short call with your grandparents. They miss us so much but the truth of being together keeps us apart. When we say I miss you we mean we miss how things would be if we were all just a little better than we are. A little more forgiving, a little more flexible, a little less stuck in ... See more