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[girlzoot]

When I was twenty-four years old, one day out of the blue my mother said to me, “You need to find your father.” “Why?” I asked. At that point I hadn’t seen him in over ten years and didn’t think I’d ever see him again. “Because he’s a piece of you,” she said, “and if you don’t find him you won’t find yourself.” “I don’t need him for that,” I said. “I know who I am.” “It’s not about knowing who you are. It’s about him knowing who you are, and you knowing who he is. Too many men grow up without their fathers, so they spend their lives with a false impression of who their father is and what a father should be. You need to find your father. You need to show him what you’ve become. You need to finish that story.” —Trevor Noah/Born a Crime

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If we weren’t at school or work or church, we were out exploring. My mom’s attitude was “I chose you, kid. I brought you into this world, and I’m going to give you everything I never had.” She poured herself into me. —Trevor Noah/Born a Crime

[girlzoot]

I was flush with unwelcome, ungentlemanly annoyance. Maybe it was the journalist in me, but facts were facts, and people didn’t get to turn Amy into everyone’s beloved best friend just because it was emotionally expedient. —Gillian Flynn/Gone Girl

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“You know I once ate twenty babies?” said Cutlass Liz, looking them up and down. The crew all nodded fearfully. “I’m sure babies taste a lot better than pirates,” said the albino pirate. “Because they’d be fresher. And not as salty.” —Gideon Defoe/The Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab

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He had never married. Good double bass players, he told me, were men who made poor husbands. He had many such observations. There were no great male cellists—that’s one I remember. And his opinion of viola players, of either sex, was scarcely repeatable. —Neil Gaiman/Good Boys Deserve Favors/Fragile Things

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She listens at doors and around corners. She has always had this habit. A child in danger must learn to pay more attention to the adults than a child loved and cherished. —Naomi Alderman/The Power

[girlzoot]

Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audience would know. A variation of this is true for writers. Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days. But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. —Ray Bradbury/Zen in the Art of Writing

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“You know what I was about to say? I was about to say I don’t know what to believe anymore. And then I thought, that’s someone else’s line. That’s a line from a movie, not something I should be saying, and I wonder for a second, am I in a movie? Can I stop being in this movie? Then I know I can’t. But for a second, you think, I’ll say something different, and this will all change. But it won’t, will it?” —Gillian Flynn/Gone Girl

[girlzoot]

She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I didn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog. —Gillian Flynn/Gone Girl

[girlzoot]

There are spells to make everything speak. The master wizards were great listeners, and they devised ways to charm all things of the world, living and dead, into talking to them. That is most of it, being a wizard—seeing and listening. —Peter S. Beagle/The Last Unicorn

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My mother showed me what was possible. The thing that always amazed me about her life was that no one showed her. No one chose her. She did it on her own. She found her way through sheer force of will. —Trevor Noah/Born a Crime

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Lack of a schedule is the first step on the road descending into chaos and anarchy. What’s next, the world runs out of coffee? —Louisa Masters/Sorcerers Always Satisfy

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She had seen a great deal of beauty in her short life, but it was Jordan College beauty, Oxford beauty—grand and stony and masculine. In Jordan College, much was magnificent, but nothing was pretty. —Philip Pullman/The Golden Compass

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So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past. That is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to generation. My mother calls it “the black tax.” Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero. —Trevor Noah/Born a Crime

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Still, his pride held out for an impressively long time. But he was an adult who possessed other skills that he could fall back on in the event of defeat, and that made him weak. —Allie Brosh/Hyperbole and a Half

[girlzoot]

They pass into other worlds and steal from them and bring back what they find. Gold and jewels, of course, but other things too, like ideas, or sacks of corn, or pencils. —Philip Pullman/The Subtle Knife

[girlzoot]

Fear and shame are the backbone of my self-control. They are my source of inspiration, my insurance against becoming entirely unacceptable. They help me do the right thing. And I am terrified of what I would be without them. Because I suspect that, left to my own devices, I would completely lose control of my life. I’m still hoping that perhaps someday I’ll learn how to use willpower like a real person, but until that very unlikely day, I will confidently battle toward adequacy, wielding my crude skill set of fear and shame. —Allie Brosh/Hyperbole and a Half