Writing Inspiration | 25 | 03.20.18
Excerpts
The TV screen is a flat-definition one that Ewan bought so he could watch hockey and football games on it. Constance would rather have the old fuzzy one back, with its strangely orange people and its habit of rippling and fading: there are some things that do not fare well in high definition.
She resents the pores, the wrinkles, the nose hairs, the impossibly whitened teeth shoved up right in front of your eyes…It’s like being forced to act as someone else’s bathroom mirror, the magnifying kind: seldom a happy experience, those mirrors.
from Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood
You may say that that is not love, and I would laugh at you for presuming to know what another’s love isn’t and what his love is.
from In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman (quoted in Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien)
They should learn that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity.
from Untimely by Jill Lepore, published in The New Yorker
How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence in its ability to change the world for the better?
from Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich by Evan Osnos, published in The New Yorker
Words
gelid
(adj) icy, extremely cold
histrionic
(adj) denoting a personality disorder marked by shallow volatile emotions and attention-seeking behavior; overly theatrical or melodramatic in character or style
blithely
(adverb) in a way that shows a casual and cheerful indifference considered to be callous or improper
edifying
(adj) providing moral or intellectual instruction
📖
- Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood
- Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
- Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neill
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
- The Secret Life of Time by Alan Burdick, The New Yorker
Recently finished
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
