Words that have resonated in 2022
I am a hoarder of words, of pictures (and my maxxed-out iCloud storage constantly reminds me of it), of anything that makes me feel. Sometimes it’s just a phrase in a random paragraph, sometimes it’s a song, sometimes it’s a movie line — and sometimes it’s the whole damn thing (hi Beartown). As a child, I filled up with journals with these lines, and sticky-noted my favorites all over my bedroom window. Now they just sit in my Notes app. But this feels like a better home for them.
“I once read something an educator wrote: they said any time they found themselves getting frustrated at their students, they would just look down at the kids’ hands. The littleness of those hands reminded the educator how much life was left for each child to experience. Today, I think of the littleness of children’s bodies, and how those bodies contain such boundless love and brilliance. To imagine living in a world that will not protect that preciousness — an untenable future for us all.” — Thao Thai
“Love requires brokenness.”
Lovely War by Julie Berry
Authenticity by Madison Cunningham
“We’re so scared to walk through this life
So afraid of what the world’s eyes are seeing
Rather then simply being, who we are
When it comes to social I think I’m a genius
When It comes to being real, I honestly have no idea
Where I’m going or who I’m becoming
So good at playing the game, acting a certain way, saying all the right things
But its not really what I’m thinking
Somebody tell me what is honesty? when you push aside false humility?When I let go of insecurity, I find my identity in who you are
Realizing who I really am …
Am I afraid of honesty, honestly?
But when I let go of insecurity, and show authenticity
Who am I? Who am I?”
I want a baby because I have love in my bones. It’s building up there like a calcium deposit. And I want that child to be biological so my husband and I can exist in one body, because longing to possess one body is the way I feel when I look at him, that we are connected but never by enough, not in the permanent way I desire. But more than that, I want him, I want us, and I want to be happy.
Taylor Hahn, “What if trying for a baby isn’t working?” on CupofJo
“No man who cares about originality will ever be original. It’s the man who’s only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original — and doesn’t notice it.” — C.S. Lewis
“No one is an empty seed.”
Johnnyswim concert on April 15, 2022
“It hurts so bad, but it’s still so wonderful.”
Johnnyswim, talking about “So Wonderful” at their April 15, 2022 concert
The Restorative Joy of Cycling
“The upshot is, when I’m cycling the whole world becomes high-res. As I whiz around NYC I … see the city with uniquely granular detail you get while biking, gliding past soaring prewar buildings, lunar potholes, a blizzard of fashion on the sidewalks, street vendors hawking candied peanuts, delivery trucks bedecked with graffiti. Cycling in New York makes the scenery pop.
Most people find that when they go for a walk, they absorb the street-scene better than when they race by in a car. Obviously! But cycling is, for me, the perfect sensual midpoint between the two. You get the visual banquet of walking, but because you’re going faster you get a bigger, longer feast — miles and miles of busy streets, in technicolor close-up.
When I arrive home, I feel like I’ve microdosed the pure essence of urban life. I’ve been in the world. I suspect this why cycling is so good at getting me out of my head.
“The thing is, getting to a critical age, you understand how pointless the pursuit of perfection is. You can’t look for perfection — it’s beside the point. Perfection? How about pleasure? Instead of trying to find perfection, I’m trying to find pleasure. Like with ice cream, I’m not looking for perfect ice cream, but pleasure in it.”
Perfection Wasted
by John Updike
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.
“Who do you picture when you’re writing?
I have an ideal reader, I’ve made them up. I don’t see them distinctly, but I sense what they need. My reader is patient but not super patient; they kind of want to come with me, but don’t know for sure. I think, what do I do to engage this reader and hold their hand and say, let’s go down this path and go down that path, and say I’ll keep you safe even if it’s uncomfortable.”
(Embarrassingly, I didn’t save where I found this writing advice)
“As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.”
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
(I told my therapist that I often don’t sit with the weight of all that is physically wrong and broken with me. She asked if I’d read The Poisonwood Bible. I nodded, and she proceeded to quote these lines. I’d brushed right past them during my initial read, but hearing her say them, I thought, “That’s it.”)
CupofJo blog comments
Someone:
“Lulu seems like such a firecracker! Do the boys just love her? Thanks so much for sharing.”
Joanna:
they ADORE her. she is the beating heart of our family.
(An aside: Damn. I want to be called the beating heart of a family.)
“To be loved and love at the highest count
Means to lose all the things I can’t live without
Let it be known that I will choose to lose
It’s a sacrifice but I can’t live a lie
Let it be known, let it be known that I tried”
“To Be Loved” by Adele
“I dated someone in college who said his goal was to create more than he consumed — art, research, media, etc. On my birthday, he wrote “I hope you get to make things you’re proud of this year. Big, new things that didn’t exist before you got here.” …
“I think the older we get, the quieter brave looks. It’s no longer about winning a game or hurling yourself across the playground on monkey bars, but the hidden moments that people don’t clap for: asking someone to coffee, moving cities, trying to have a baby, hard conversations, building a website.
“It is easy to believe we have to have a “one thing.” And we think we have to be exceptional or the best at it in order to really claim it. It’s a dance of perfectionism that keeps us from growing, playing, failing, being new and enjoying the process as much as the end results. So cheers to all the new, brave things to be proud of this year, simply because they didn’t exist before we got here.”
My friend Emma Kate
Sweet Peril
George Macdonald
“Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too much, a kiss too long,
And there follows a mist and weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.
Alas, how hardly things go right!
Tis hard to watch in the summer night,
For the sigh will come, and the kiss will stay,
And the summer night is a winter day.
And yet how easily things to right,
If the sigh and a kiss of a summer’s night
Come deep from the soul in the stronger ray
That is born in the light of a winter’s day.
And things can never go badly wrong
If the heart be true and the love be strong.
For the mist, if it comes, or the weeping rain
Will be changed by the love into sunshine again.”
“I keep calling South Dakotans ‘horizon people’. If one person stands up and starts doing something great, a whole community sees them standing tall and joins them in their mission.”
Tenley Schwartz
(An aside: “horizon people”! I love that! I want that!)
Hannah Brencher, “A Divine Partnership”
“We live in a culture of constant feedback and praise. It’s very easy to start thinking highly of ourselves when people are commenting on our days, our disciplines, and our creations. We can start to think it’s all on us, that we are here to churn out content and feed the beast of social media.
But the magic you and I are looking for can’t be found on social media. It’s found in the quiet. It’s found in the unplugging from what everyone thinks to get back to basics. It’s found in sitting before God and pleading through prayer, “I can’t do this on my own. Will you come and partner with me?”
He always will. I promise you — he will always partner with you. …
Flannery O’Connor once wrote in her private prayer journal, “Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story-just like the typewriter was mine.”
“What distressed me most — more even than my own folly — was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?” — George Macdonald
The Philadelphia Story / Funny You Should Ask
“I don’t want to be worshipped. I want to be loved.”
“You can worship someone you don’t know, but you can’t love them.”
“One of the things that several of the journalists asked me on this trip — and on my US and UK book tours — was what day I would go back to, if I could, and every time I gave the same answer — I would go back to a family vacation, any of them, as they were all much the same. My brother always found a friend to play with, my mother was always busying around, playing tennis, probably organizing our whole lives, and my father and I would be sitting in lounge chairs by the pool, drinking Coca Cola, each of us with a stack of books beside us. I love thinking about how this copy of my father’s book made its way to Rome, if it was read sitting in a little cafe chair, maybe a father sitting next to his daughter, her with an Agatha Christie, just like me then, and just like me now. And then finishing the book (it’s a good one), and leaving it there in the hotel for its next person. Sometimes grief feels indistinguishable from luck.” — Emma Straub
“I don’t know if I’ve ever chased any of my dreams,” [Taika] Waititi said. “My dreams have sort of developed through being part of the dream.”
“Forget holding cards to your chest. Throw them across the table!
I love Sioux Falls and I love my house and I love this neighborhood and I love my church and I love my job. I feel so lucky to be part of making this place good.
Commitment is one of the best parts of my grown up life. It’s a delight to be tied to this place, in community with so many.”
Tenley Schwartz
“When I’m sad, it’s usually because I was happy first.”
Emma Brodie, Songs in Ursa Major
What if your ambition outstrips your talent?
Rather, the keynote of most long-lasting creative careers is dissatisfaction — a nagging feeling that what you’re doing is not quite good enough, which keeps you moving forward, always chasing a vague but powerful sense of what could be.
Do you have that feeling in your writing life? I hear the dissatisfaction with what you’ve produced so far — that comes through loud and clear. What I don’t hear is whether you know what you’re after. Do you feel a pressure inside you, of an idea or a sense of the world that you want to convey? Is there a kind of writing you want to read but which doesn’t seem to exist, and which you’re trying to invent?
I ask all this because I think some of us writers start out wanting to write excellent fiction (or nonfiction, in my case) and then get stuck because that’s . . . the wrong starting point? At the end of the day, the writing is just a vehicle for something else — some feeling about the world or human experience that you want to suggest or precipitate in your readers.
“My writing and photography go hand in hand; they both act as sites of honest expression, and encourage me to think about how I see the world, how I move through it, how I love and express that love. When I’m confronted by the blank page, in a way, I’m confronting myself, who I am, all of the nuances which make me. There’s a freedom in affording myself or others this kind of space, to just be themselves, even if that’s for a brief moment.”
“The year before Azumah Nelson began writing Open Water, his godfather, aunt, and three grandparents died.[1] He spoke of his writing at the time, saying it “came about as I was trying to afford my grief, and in turn, myself, more form and detail. I didn’t want to feel so hazy anymore. So I was spending a lot of the time at libraries, gallery spaces, cinemas, concerts, trying to go past the level of knowing, towards feeling, and asking where those feelings come from. That’s a question which is written throughout Open Water. How do you feel?”[2]
Azumah Nelson continued, “There’s a level of vulnerability which love demands. To ask someone to see you is to ask someone to see all of you and trusting someone with all of you can be difficult. To see all this beauty and rhythm and joy but also to see your uglier parts, your pain, your grief. But it’s wonderful when it does happen, when you are no longer being looked at, but being seen.”[1]
The writer said “he had to make himself vulnerable to write it,” much like the poet Morgan Parker says writers sometimes must “[dig] so deep you touch bone.”[1] Azumah Nelson said, “I feel like I did this and then some. It is a joy to write but at times, quite heartbreaking. I guess, I’d love for readers not just to know what I’m saying, but to feel it too.”
Open Water’s Wikipedia page
Basically, all these screenshots below from Fredrik Backman’s Goodreads comments on his books. Such a fangirl.
“I read once that not everyone thinks in words. I was shocked, imaging these other people who don’t use language to make sense of everyone and everything, who don’t automatically organize the world into chapters, pages, sentences.”
Emily Henry, Book Lovers
“Fear lies at the unexamined core of who we are. Faith grows from the surpassing of fear in spite of its presencence. It is not a denial of fear, but rather a “working” from fear, so that faith, by its very process itself, acknowledges the fear and in fact uses it to engulf the fear itself, transforming it into the most powerful, rather than debilitating, force there is: Love.”
“Sometimes the loftiness of one’s gifts outweighs or exceeds the depth of his character.”
Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford
“… I was born and then she died.”
“Yes.”
“But when we talk about her, she comes to life.”
“Never forget that, Esme. Words are our tools of resurrection.”
Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.
It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life — just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another.
Mary Oliver, “To Begin With, the Sweet Grass”
Holy Sonnet 14
John Donne
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Satire III
John Donne
… though truth and falsehood be
Near twins, yet truth a little elder is;
Be busy to seek her; believe me this,
He’s not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best.
To adore, or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong, is. …
Don’t Hesitate
by Mary Oliver
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
“As you grow older, you enjoy [a rival’s] success more,” Federer explained. “You see how much they’ve given. The rivalry morphs into something different than the beginning, when you’re just trying to beat the guy.”
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
“And I really want to be wowed. Isn’t this why we read — for our world to be opened wide? Isn’t this what compels us to underline sentences — because they have awoken something in us? Isn’t this the very heartbeat of telling it slant — making way for surprise and discovery?”
Stephanie Duncan Smith, The Slant Letter
