A collection of thoughts, ideas, and pieces of work that I admire.

“For no other reason than it was habit, I reached into the letter box, tucking the little stack of envelopes under my arm. With a pang of guilt, I realized it was one of those mundane things that went on, even when your world stopped spinning.”

Adrienne Young, The Unmaking of June Farrow

“Invest in what’s real. Clean as you go. Drink while you cook. Make it fun. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It will be what it will be.”

-Gwyneth Paltrow

“It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.”

―Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.”

―J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“This is what I want: I want to grab my brother’s hand and run back through time, losing years like coats falling from our shoulders.”

―Jandy Nelson, I’ll Give You the Sun

“There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well.”

―Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find…meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those souffles, all that creme caramel, all those daubes and albondigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them.”

―Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I say this to you knowing full well that I am riddled with contradictions. As you’ve read in my other letters, I love my brother’s bravery, but I hate how he’s abandoned me to fight for a god. I love my mother, but I hate what booze has done to her, as if it’s drowning her and I don’t know how to save her. I love the words I write until I soon realize how much I hate them, as if I am destined to always be at war within myself.”

―Rebecca Ross, Divine Rivals

“In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Matthew’s observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the “gods had left confetti.”

―David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon

“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.”

―Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out