the tea party is private,
but everything else is public. (:
Have some tea Leave a comment if adding. (:

I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

...For the first time, sitting there in the soundproof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little golden cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked...

...I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the digs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.

I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three...nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.

-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.

People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.

And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it. ...

... But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?...

...Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly, at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can't be discounted.

-Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen.

Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slipcover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it, we have something to hide.

-Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen.

“And besides, cities are turning into one single city, a single endless city where the differences which once characterized each of them are disappearing. This idea, which runs through my book Invisible Cities, came to me from the way that many of us now live: we continually move from one airport to another, to enjoy a life that is almost identical no matter what city you find yourself in.”

“At the same time, we are close to the time when no city will be able to be used as a city: you waste more time on short trips than on long journeys. …international journeys as much as short journeys in the city are no longer an exploration of a series of different places: they are simply movements from one point to another between which there is an empty interval, a discontinuity, a parenthesis above the clouds if it is an air trip, and a parenthesis beneath the earth if it is a city journey.”

-Hermit in Paris, Italo Calvino.

“Words and stories are cheap now. We type them into our handy computers, do some cutting and pasting and run a spell-check, and, pow, a story. They do not have the importance of the stories that were only told in the dark of a winter’s moon; or the stories that were handwritten, word by copperplate word, on a table in the corner of the parlor; or the tales that were passed down orally through a thousand years.
But stories should not be cheap; they should cost the writer something, and the reader something else. Ideally, you read something of mine and it changes you, if only by making you view something in a new way. Of course it has changed me; I had to tell the truth to tell the story — whatever the truth is.

“Myths” is about that. I wrote it for a comic book called Andrew Vachss’s Underground, which collected comic and text short stories set in a near-future world. I loved the world, not least because it allowed me to think of a way for stories to be important again.”

-Kij Johnson; Tales for the Long Rains.