“The family assigns unfair roles, and never forgives the one who does not fulfill them.”

“Like a warm summer night or a third cocktail, Lemann lulls and envelops you.” @brandyjensen.bsky.social

“‘The Oyster Diaries’ is remorseful and melancholy, and it leaves a wide wake. . . . It’s an epic of disgruntlement that’s in touch with life’s little moments of grace.” @dwightgarner.bsky.social

"Please, Jim," she said. "Please. They'll hear us." “Who'll hear us? Emma can't hear us." "The radio." "Oh, I'm sick!" he shouted. "I'm sick to death of your apprehensiveness. The radio can't hear us. Nobody can hear us. And what if they can hear us? Who cares?"

“Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple—or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren’t.”

“Did laboratory studies affect my poetry? I am sure they did. . . . Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested, drawing and identifying, liberate—at least have some bearing on—the imagination, it seems to me.”

“You’re looking for some one person out there somewhere who will one day hear your voice and suddenly write back.”

“I think in fictional terms—memory transmuted by observation and experience.”

“like a powerlifter hoisting a Magic 8 Ball . . .” @alexandrajacobs.bsky.social

“Here is the land of blur.”—Anthony Lane

'How many times must I tell you I don’t want to make more money?’

“There is always a sheen to his writing. The sentences cut a swift, clean trail across the page—a mackerel through the water.”—David Remnick

“Although I can’t claim to recall the performances in detail—I was between ten and twelve—their echoes have never left my mind.”—Alex Ross

“You’ll finish his secret history five pounds heavier but a little happier.” @alexandrajacobs.bsky.social

“Mann might have argued that there is not only a moral but also an artistic virtue in being outwardly boring and banal. It is a hedge against mania. . . . Every pilgrimage is suspect . . .”—Alex Ross

“the peculiar effect of putting 21st-century manners into the head of a 1960s segregationist.”

“at the core of the memoir is the persistent hum of a simple truth.” @jenszalai.bsky.social

‘10 February ‘The party I would have liked to attend is my own funeral. I’d like to know who came and what they said, who wept and who didn’t, and how long it took for friends to get over it.’

“Sams is alive at her typewriter.” @dwightgarner.bsky.social

“Prose is only as good as its approximation of the condition of poetry—that condition in which not a rhythm, not a particle of sound can be changed without upsetting the entire page.”

“Then all of us said ‘Salud!’ as many times as could be for six of them and three of us, and then they filed out of the café, the six of them, tired and dusty and little, as men of a mighty horde are little.”

From the obituary by Alden Whitman, a quote from Edmund Wilson: “‘she has put into what she has written a voice, a state of mind, an era, a few moments of human experience that nobody else has conveyed.’”

“by almost any measure, 2026 is a goat rodeo.”—Jill Lepore

“Underneath all the moralizing is a relentless push to make intimacy subject to state power . . .” @jenszalai.bsky.social

Stephen Grosz, from the article by Daphne Merkin: ‘For many people, what we know best is suffering. Our suffering. And people stay there.

“I’m almost invariably stuck after one page or one paragraph—at which point I have to begin thinking about what the story could possibly be about. I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.”

“The album’s concern is one that has shaped my own life and the lives of many people I know: when the world is increasingly inhospitable, is isolating oneself that irrational of a response?”—Hanif Abdurraqib

“maybe the idiosyncratic lives of these peregrinating writers invite a . . . proposal: Read this book and be enthralled.” @jenszalai.bsky.social

“My new best friend Chazzy . . .” @danbarry58.bsky.social

‘Freud can be criticized for all sorts of things. But his genius was to make something out of a failure.’ Jonathan Lear on Freud, failure and speaking truthfully. granta.com/we-are-creat...

“I trusted my motives in taking possession of a piece of material I genuinely considered my own. After all, the book wasn’t about Mama, it was about me coming to maturity.”

“A couple of times, Roger took both my hands in his and looked me in the eye—an earnest, uncharacteristic gesture that startled me and brought me to attention—and said he was so, so, so sorry that Andy was old, too.”—Margaret Moorman

‘I questioned all that I’ve learned in life, multiple times this week . . . I questioned it all. And then I left those questions behind, and stepped into the arena anyway.’

“Groff is spilling so much salt right now, Morton should give her a jingle.” @alexandrajacobs.bsky.social

“I began seeing my memories with the wisdom of adult hindsight . . .”

From William Maxwell: “Smiling, she lit a cigarette and then, unable to keep the joke to herself any longer, she leaned toward him, took his hand in hers, and said, ‘Valentine’s Day is next Thursday.’”

From Peter Ackroyd: “The four of them were instinctive novelists, mainly because they saw no distinction between invention and reality; it is hard to overemphasize how much those unreal worlds meant to them, since they seem to have dreamed, lived, and imagined very little else.”

“Perhaps the best way to appreciate Updike and discover what all the fuss was about is to start with the early stories and novels and carve out your own canon at a stately pace, as his lordship would desire.

“The as-yet-unspoken words will be found in this place where the language falters, on the frontier of psyche and soma.”

“when suddenly I became hot, flushed all over, with the understanding that these people loved me. Perhaps I had never before been open enough to feel it, but in that moment I did: how fragile a person was in loving you, and the terrible responsibility that came with it.

“Can anyone say confidently that he will not succeed when he tries once again to jail his political opponents for speaking out against him, as he seems so intent upon doing?” @sbg1.bsky.social

Hear @paranoiacs.bsky.social's cover of Lucinda Williams' "Passionate Kisses" (and a bunch of other tracks from their new album out this week)

“It is a sign of a fatally limited imagination to assume that we can only ever desire the pittance to which we are currently reconciled.”—Becca Rothfeld

“That’s the way it is for women. Our whole lives are one great Catch 22, in which the more we stand up against those who abuse us, and the structures that make such abuse possible, the more we are portrayed as having deserved it.”

“The best are strong enough that it’s as if she carved them, with a knife, onto a library desk.” @dwightgarner.bsky.social

“No one was who they meant to be, not yet, anyway.”—Jill Lepore

“I told myself that if I were a maker of perfumes I would make one and call it Spring, and it would smell like this cool, sweet early-morning air and I would let only beautiful young brown girls use it . . .”—Ann Petry

“what more will it take for us to finally acknowledge that, when he says this stuff, he actually means to follow through with it?” @sbg1.bsky.social

Ruth Marcus, in The New Yorker Daily, speaking with Caroline Mimbs Nyce, the newsletter editor: “We weren’t just a newspaper—we were a community. And we did what we did not because people were paying us to do it but because we love doing it.

From @ruthmarcus.bsky.social: “The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.