Sublime

For Orlando’s taste was broad; he was no lover of garden flowers only; the wild and the weeds even had always a fascination for him.

Our social moorings aren’t the only things that restrain our creative impulses. We are also limited by false aesthetics: those notions that we have developed in schools and libraries, and from listening to critics that adhere to some misplaced notion of a literary canon.

obdurate.

the by-product of such persistent acquisition is a side we don’t see or talk about much: the necessary disposal of the old and boring.

Joan Didion, who knew how to wear clothes, was too brilliant and great for anyone to write like and too skinny and sultry to look like. I thought if I couldn’t be Joan, then I’d have to be dowdy and/or crazy, like Virginia Woolf. Of course, there was always Colette, but then she was French—not living in L.A.—and even she scared men.

I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself.

society dismisses fat people, don’t they? Is this person bright, or cunning, or kind? No, society says they’re fat.

Anthony Blanche,