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it was like my entire mental landscape broke apart and all was possibility and flux

that a person like her could even exist was enough to make me feel that the world was a good place.

This is one of the joys and challenges of love: the more skillfully you love someone, the more held, encouraged, and accepted they feel, the more they

My career is a story of being drawn to studying people who were doing the thing they were meant to do.

Taste and touch—knowing what’s good, knowing what’s right, knowing what you want—evolve into essential, tactical skills that remain solely the privile

yes, they’re untranslatable, they must stay in their own element.

I began to focus on what I wanted to see more of. I moved toward the good, rather than away from the bad.

nearly everything worth paying attention to was made by someone who cared deeply about their craft. Caring enough to pursue mastery over years is how

At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.

Creating your own luck is an audacity game.

I obsess so hard about ideas that I fail all status games

you make good work when you let your guard down.

The thing to do is to be undeterred by trivial things, have conviction in our world view, and simultaneously be nimble enough to react to important ch

Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.

For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.

Friction eroded poor execution and clumsy ideas until something simpler and more elegant was revealed.

The root of the word essay comes from the French essayer, meaning “to try.”

“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”

Gornick begins with a simple observation about selves: that all of us contain a variety of them. One person might be, for instance, “a daughter, a lov

I want to spend time with words. And I want them to make people feel something.

Serendipity happens when I focus on doing things for the simple reason that I love them. I walked down Green Lanes on my thirtieth birthday for no oth

There will be certain things that only you will be in a position to care for. For some reason, it feels imperative to me that you should protect and b

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.” — David Foster Wallace

What I mean is that with its blunt authority the New Oxford definition of "pathos" -- "a quality that evokes pity or sadness" -- shuts down the conver

It is the decision to let yourself be undone by what draws you in.

But this is the answer that arrived when I tried to feel into the question

Conversations are more invigorating to me when we’re both using “I.”

A virtue of watching a movie on my laptop is that I can pause.

Did The Argonauts always begin as it does?

If somebody had never seen a dog before and you told them everything about a dog and then they tried to draw one, they still wouldn’t get it right. Do

For Daisy, for being there from the beginning. And for Henry, for promising to stay until the end. — Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

To my family, blood and spirit— All ghosts are queer. — Your Love Is Not Good by Johanna Hedva

For my mother and father. Please don’t read this. — Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

To all of you who dance with me in the circle of love— To Anthony with whom I whirl and whirl and whirl — communion by bell hooks

On arriving at her door in the rain, a stranger with suitcase in tow, I was furnished with lunch before I learned it was her birthday.

Each was an answer to an unanswerable call.

GTM actually means Get Together More

playing it brave

The output matters, but the intention, the struggle, the care is what makes it count — what gives it weight.

Light things shape culture, but rarely shape us.

One company now attaches Claude's answer to their interview tasks and asks candidates: show us what AI cannot do.

AI can’t digress.

Paynter’s Lucky Links

By the time it was ready, 2,500 people found our project interesting enough to join a wait list for our first jacket. And since then we’ve kept making

the idea of creating friction <> intentionality

The world, I've discovered, is a masterful flirt. It leaves little gifts everywhere—the way morning light catches in spider webs, how rain releases th

The world stops being a backdrop and starts being a conversation.

make a non-thing a thing

We’d prefer you took some time out with a book or enjoyed some time unplugged

NO OUTSIDE FOOD & DRINKS — OUR COFFEE GETS JEALOUS!

But those kind of illogical blessings happen when you are open to a gift.

Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

But unlike irony and satire, taste is earnest. It doesn’t like to fake it and it can’t be too far removed from reality.

Taste honors someone’s standards of quality, but also the distinctive way the world bounces off a person. It reflects what they know about how the wor

The question of swimming or not is not really about the water; it’s about doing or not doing things – things that are pleasant, joyful, and right for

It was overcast and smelled like the ocean and eucalyptus.

I'm not sure why you won't find writing like that in dictionaries these days, but you won't.

Like relishing embarrassment and pride alike, and having flowers around.