"When I got out into the Place de l'Odéon I am feeling happy, what with my new hair and my new hat and the good meal and the wine and the fine and the coffee and the smell of night in Paris. I'm not going to any beastly little bar tonight. No, tonight I'm going somewhere where there's music; somewhere I can be with a lot of people; somewhere where there's dancing. But where? By myself, where can I go? I'll have one more drink first and then think it out."

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Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

"But increasingly, she said, this position feels like I am standing on a small rock in the ocean that is getting even smaller by the minute as the water rises. There has been no territory marked out, she said, and so there is no place where I can take a step and find myself on dry land. It perhaps remains the case, she said, that for a woman to have a territory she must live as Bourgeois's spider, unless she is prepared to camp on male territory and abide by its terms."

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Kudos by Rachel Cusk



"Equally damaging is our insistence that all bodies should be healthy. Health is not a state we owe the world. We are not less valuable, worthy or lovable because we are not healthy...there is no standard of health that is achievable for all bodies. Our belief that there should be anchors the systemic oppression of ableism and reinforces the notion that people with illnesses and disabilities have defective bodies rather than different bodies...We must move from occasionally celebrating difference...to developing a difference-celebrating culture."
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The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor


Quoting Rilke's "Ninth Elegy":
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, Just once. And never again.
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This Close to Happy by Daphne Merkin

Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? -- Virginia Woolf
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No One Tells You This by Gynnis MacNicol


"...after the umpteenth comma deleted and undeleted, I suddenly lose the will to continue writing...I know the times I feel most excited about what I'm writing are when I should be most suspicious...the worst moment to stop writing is when I no longer feel like going on. On those occasions, it's always better to keep rapping thoughts into the keyboard, like drilling holes in the ground, until the exact word emerges."
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Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli

"'Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third-story window...[but] because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing.'"
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Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation and Change by Tao Lin


 "As a business traveler, you'll likely be met at your destination by someone who asks, 'How was your flight?' This, as if there are interesting variations and you might answer, 'The live orchestra was a nice touch,' or 'The first half was great, but then they let a baby take over the controls and it got all bumpy.' In fact, there are only two kinds of flights: ones in which you die and ones in which you do not."
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Calypso by David Sedaris




2 Sleeping Outside
An interesting point they made in their report is that people share the pleasure of sleeping outside within the solidarity of sleeping with others. It may be that both humans and elephant seals share the pleasure of sleeping in herds in the bright sunshine.
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Ex-formation by Kenya Hara

"On the one hand, I felt a jealous anger rising within me, a desire for her to desire me, the only kind of desire, Alex had once told me during a fight, I was able to sustain."

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10:04 by Ben Lerner

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