Colleen Taylor

At my age, I've outgrown the notion of "favorites." (Can we outgrow it as a society too? People sometimes ask my toddler to name her "favorite" color. I know they mean well, but she always seems so stumped by the question, but I don't want to encourage her to conjure a fake answer. She's two! All colors are awesome.)

That said: I'm currently re-reading Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, which I decided was my favorite novel when I read it one slow sunburned summer at age 19 or 20. And I have to say, it's still got it.

An excerpt:

I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me—and I think for all of us—not only our own hope, but America’s everlasting, living dream. I think the life which we have fashioned in America, and which has fashioned us—the forms we made, the cells that grew, the honeycomb that was created—was self-destructive in its nature, and must be destroyed.

I think these forms are dying, and must die, just as I know that America and the people in it are deathless, undiscovered, and immortal, and must live. I think the true discovery of America is before us. I think the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. And I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon.

“We don’t want to be fixed in something that doesn’t move. In French we call it getting too bourgeois.”

--Alice Lemoine, whose chic and relatively minimal family home was featured in the October 2019 issue of Architectural Digest (which is lately my favorite magazine into which I escape from my very bourgeois life)

"At the time, like many of her friends, she was frozen, unsure of how to proceed. In Oakland, where she lives, it felt like everyone she knew was asking themselves, 'What is the point of what I am doing? Am I adding anything to the world?' At the same time, it felt difficult to distance oneself from the online clamor long enough to formulate an answer."

-- from the NYT Book Review of Jenny Odell's “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy." I really, really liked the essay she wrote which apparently led to the book. If I can pry myself away from the Internet for long enough maybe I'll actually read the book too.

“I’m too old—not too old, but I’m tired—to put a lot of energy into something I don’t really want to do. And I am genuine when I say I can walk away.”

-Hannah Gadsby, the (perhaps now former) stand-up comic on deciding to leave comedy for good after her very successful show Nanette. Via her interview with Vanity Fair