9 Quotes by Joanna Rakoff

Typing was, as the placement agency lady had assured me, like riding a bike: my fingers remembered their places on the keyboard and flew across it as if by their own will.

He surrounded himself with fools – the broken, the failed or failing, the sad and confused – so that he might be their king. Which, obviously made him nothing but the king of fools.

In literature, as in life, sometimes there are no right answers.

I know, I said reflexively, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be normal. I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to write novels and make films and speak ten languages and travel around the world.

Salinger had once sat at his desk, trying to figure out what made a story, how to structure a novel, how to be a writer, how to be.

To read Salinger is to engage in an act of such intimacy that it, at times, makes you uncomfortable. In Salinger, characters don’t sit around contemplating suicide. They pick up guns and shoot themselves in the head. All through that weekend, even as I ripped through his entire oeuvre, I kept having to put the books down and breathe. He shows us his characters at their most bald, bares their most private thoughts, most telling actions. It’s almost too much. Almost.

What terrified her was the set of circumstances that allowed her to eat a full pound of spaghetti, the unmoored, untethered quality of her life, in which no one – no mother, sister, roommate, professor, boyfriend, anyone – was there to monitor her habits and behaviors, to say, “Haven’t you had enough?” or “Can I share that with you?” or “Let’s have dinner together tonight” or even “What are you doing for dinner?” She woke up, went to work, came home, alone.

So we’re all doing a pretty good job not revealing our emotions, right? But if you can’t reveal your emotions, how do you go on? What do you do with them? Because, you see, I keep crying at odd moments.

She’d never spent entire days lying on her bed reading, entire nights making up complicated stories in her head. She’d not dreamed of willing herself into Anne of Green Gables and Jane Eyre so that she might have real friends, friends who understood her thorny desires and dreams. How could she spend her days – her life – ushering books into publication but not love them in the way that I did, the way that they needed to be loved?