The brother of a schoolfriend owned a photography gallery in the East End, and maybe she was going to have an exhibition there later in the year. Nowadays I would see through this kind of thing immediately; but this was the first occasion I had come across someone for whom art was a means of avoiding reality rather than confronting it head on, an idea so strange to me that I didn’t fully comprehend it at the time. - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
…I remarked upon the extraordinary clouds above us. He barely glanced up at them and made no comment. Then, remembering, brightening, he said, ‘Constable did some amazing paintings of clouds; I must show you pictures of them.’ A tree, a painting of a tree: he would always choose the painting. – Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
Because even then I understood that theatre, if it was any good at all, wasn’t something you saw, it was something that happened to you. – Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
We threaded our way around a group of journalists who were disclosing to each other their coastal preferences… – Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
“Ahaha,” I agreed politely while Cookie ratified her little witticism with raucous braying. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
“You know,” he said after a moment. “I never meant you to think, that time, that I was saying you were self-absorbed, or something of that sort.” “Oh, I know,” I said. When had he said I was self-absorbed? “I don’t think of myself as a particularly self-absorbed person, so it wouldn’t really have struck home in any case.” How strange. So Rafe had accused me of being self-absorbed. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
‘Dark feelings can become a habit,’ he’d said to me once when we were talking – arguing – about this. ‘And if they’re strong enough, like many strong feelings they can even be enjoyable.’ He said that this was why the peace process wasn’t working, that the whole population was locked in a trance of grief that they didn’t break out of because it defined them, it made them feel real. - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
Palestinians are beginning to discover the possibilities of nonviolence, which Israel, with its ethical and political traditions, would find far harder to resist than rocks and rockets. The longer the occupation lasts, and the larger the Arab and Palestinian populations grow in territory under Israeli control, the more untenable Israel’s future as both Jewish and democratic becomes. – Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker
‘…Conventional life always expects you to meet it more than halfway. You should give yourself the benefit of the doubt from time to time.’ - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
It was years before I could see why he was doing it – alarm, I suspect, at the unadorned reality of my own personality. Be that as it may, once you’re conscious of what’s happening, it’s incredibly tiresome. - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
Sometimes the most important and powerful element is an absence, a lack, a burnished space in your mind that glows and aches as you try to fill it. - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
Natalie must have been just about my age, but there might be an infinite number of ways to be twenty, I saw, shocked. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
You could put a blond wig on a hot-water heater and some dude would try to fuck it. – Tina Fey, Bossypants
We can’t expect our gay friends to always be single, celibate, and arriving early with the nacho fixin’s. And we really need to let these people get married, already. – Tina Fey, Bossypants
Ellen calls and asks what I’m doing with myself. When I say I don’t really know, she says, “Well, I mean, you get up, and then what do you do?” Sometimes it seems to me that there is a growing number of women, and that I am not among them. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
It angers me that I must be so assertive on such shaky grounds to make people believe that I run, and that when they believe me, they don’t care. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
I see Ellen today, and before she gets a chance to ask what I’m up to, I tell her that I’m running a lot lately. She is delighted to hear it. It seems that she, too, after getting home from the office, reading to the kids, clearing up after the dinner guests, studying for her orals, and knocking off an article or two for some little journal, likes to get in a few miles. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
But Al Qaeda long ago fled to all corners, changing its mailing address to franchise cells in Waziristan, Peshawar, southern Yemen, and housing projects in European cities. Bin Laden’s death underscores the question of why we go on losing young men and women daily in the defense of an indefensibly corrupt government in Kabul. – David Remnick, The New Yorker
That’s the kind of trouble you get when diverse groups of people actually cross paths with one another. That’s why many of the worst things in the world happen in and around Starbucks bathrooms. – Tina Fey, Bossypants
Strether had become acquainted even on this ground with short gusts of speculation — sudden flights of fancy in Louvre galleries, hungry gazes through clear plates behind which lemon-coloured volumes were as fresh as fruit on the tree. – Henry James, The Ambassadors
I cry like a three year old who just wants to take her toy cash register into the bathtub. - Tina Fey, Bossypants
Men I had met before suddenly paid attention to me…and I hated them for it. - Tina Fey, Bossypants
If only I could be lifted up and borne off to someplace further along in time, to where the hours would move forward in a benign, steady procession and I would spend the modest coinage of daily life among pleasant people. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
But there is not one management course in the world where they recommend Self-Righteousness as a tool. - Tina Fey, Bossypants
My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist. - Tina Fey, Bossypants
…she had sat through numbers of futile interviews and sent out numbers of futile resumes. The city, in fact, appeared to be quite overstocked with women, each more ornamental and accomplished than any nineteenth-century young lady, huge quantities of whom, Patty noticed with growing terror, were waitresses. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
This is what I like to tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. – Tina Fey, Bossypants
Eunuchs are considered relentless scolds in South Asia, and the threat of being hounded by one is somehow supposed to take the place of audits. – Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker
Darrow wasn’t a philosopher; he wasn’t even an iconoclast. He was an agonist. He would argue one way; he would argue another; he just didn’t want to see bigotry thrive or watch a man die. He liked to say that creeds were dope: “No one can find life tolerable without dope. The Catholics are right, the Christian Scientists are right, the Methodists are right, the drunkards are right.” – Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
I asked the demonstrators around me, “What are we protesting today?” A university student named Latifa said, “The Interior Ministry refuses to let women be photographed for their identity cards wearing the hijab . . . They force women to remove the hijab,” she continued. “This is an insult to Islam. We are demanding that the ministry allow us to wear the hijab at all times.” Oh. - Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic
…sessions covered everything from search engine optimization for doctors’ Web sites to “The Blue Plate Special,” a urogynecologist’s advice on how to persuade a patient to add cosmetic-gyn to an incontinence surgery. – Marie Myung-Ok Lee, The Atlantic
“What are you doing?” he said, aghast. “Out. Now. Out, out.” She picked up the suitcase in one hand and shooed Stuart to the door with the other. “This is enough to get by on for a while. Let me know where you are and I’ll send the rest on to you.” “You know,” Stuart said as he trotted down the hall in front of her, “Marcia kept saying, ‘Oh, Patty is so centered. Patty is such a woman,’ but actually, Patty, you’re a very nervous person.” On the street Patty flagged down a taxi. “Take this guy to Port Authority,” she said, giving the driver a ten. She shoved Stuart into the back seat next to his suitcase and ran along behind the taxi as it took off, flapping her skirt. As she walked back down the hall, whimpering, Mr. Martinez peered out from his doorway. “The mens – the mens-” he said, his voice vibrant with commiseration. “They must do this thing. Do not cry, missy. He will come back.” - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
And when Patty returned to George’s table later, she found only more change than he could afford, she knew, and on his plate a pile of little bones that suggested he’d curled up there and died. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say what they like – it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute, to youth. One puts that in where one can – it has to come in somewhere, if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other persons. . . . The point is that they’re mine. Yes, they’re my youth; since somehow at the right time nothing else ever was. – Henry James, The Ambassadors
It came to him in fact that just here was his usual case: he was forever missing things through his general genius for missing them, while others were forever picking them up through a contrary bent. And it was others who looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he somehow who finally paid, and it was others who mainly partook. – Henry James, The Ambassadors
Did the government believe its citizens would survive nuclear attack by hiding in holes in their back yards? Not really, Roy said. The security technologist Bruce Schneier coined the term “security theatre” to describe certain measures, such as post-9/11 T.S.A. pat-downs and subway bag checks, which, he says, improve feelings of security while doing little or nothing to protect people. – Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker
Getting patients to acknowledge their own disorders also has become an ethical imperative. Implicit in the doctrine of informed consent is the notion that before agreeing to take medication patients should be aware of the nature and course of their own illnesses. In balancing rights against needs, though, psychiatry is stuck in a kind of moral impasse. It is the only field in which refusal of treatment is commonly viewed as a manifestation of illness rather than as an authentic wish. - Rachel Aviv,The New Yorker
Deinstitutionalization was a nationwide social experiment that did not go as planned. Overgrown hospitals were shut down or emptied, but many fewer community centers were opened than had been proposed. Resources steadily declined; in just the past three years, $2.2 billion has been cut from state mental-health budgets. “Wishing that mental illness would not exist has led our policymakers to shape a health-care system as if it did not exist,” Paul Appelbaum said in his 2002 inaugural address as president of the American Psychiatric Association. Today, there are three times as many mentally ill people in jails as in hospitals. Others end up on the streets. – Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker
Strether paused anew, on the last flight, at this final rather breathless sense of what Chad’s life was doing with Chad’s mother’s emissary. It was dragging him, at strange hours, up the staircases of the rich; it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long hot days; it was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for a life of his own. – Henry James, The Ambassadors
Outside, too, was the London Marta had come to but had never before entered. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
From the moment she was born people had been happy to tell her what to do, down to the most minute detail; Eds. Clarke & Melton knew just what was happening; there were admonitions and exhortations plastered all over the walls – this is how to behave, this is what to think, this is how to think it, that’s then, this is now, this is where to put your sock – but no one had ever said one little thing that would get her through any five given minutes of her life! - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
