“I was working on this novel in earnest and then I decided to focus on stories for a little while, so now I hope to get back into it, but oh, my goodness. It’s difficult. And then there are always a bunch of doomed-feeling stories sitting on my desktop in various stages of abandonment, so periodically I’ll go back there to check on them, 6th grade science fair-style: ‘Did one of you manage to grow, by a miracle that had nothing to do with me?’”
– Karen Russell

“Being in love with you,” Zelda tells F. Scott, “is like being love with one’s own past.” It is near the book’s end, he is drunk and pummelled, and she is rubbing his belly.

Age is the central issue for both Zelda and F. Scott. Not many people get to be young as hard as they did, or have to suffer the aftermath of youth quite so painfully. In a way, it’s like they’re doing it so we don’t have to—adventurously, experimentally, like the Curies handled radium. And they acquit themselves poorly as characters in novels, because the very explosiveness that makes them transfixing also makes them remote.

Besides, they’re too doomed to envy, too insufferable to love. So what they inspire instead is a sort of defensive sidestep, a desire to affirm the value in all the mundane, grownup things that the rest of us get instead of incandescent youth: responsibility, personal growth, caring about other people, feeling rueful self-awareness.

Rather than capturing F. Scott and Zelda’s power, Fowler, Robuck, and Spargo bear us sensibly into adulthood.

—"Saving Zelda,“ by Molly Fischer

It doesn’t matter how. It matters what.

Thinking about time wasted is a waste of time.

If you have the chance to be who you thought you were, do you have the strength to become that person?

No one gets out of this alive.

“Goth girls, coke ghosted, rehabbed at twelve and stripping sober, begged for my sagas of degradation, epiphany. They pressed in with their inks, their dyes, their labial metals and scarified montes, cheered their favorite passages, the famous ones, where I ate some sadistic dealer’s turd on a Portuguese sweet roll for the promise of a bindle, or broke into a funeral parlor and slit a corpse open for the formaldehyde. My fans would stomp and holler for my sorrows, my sins, sway in stony reverence as I mapped my steps back to sanity (the stint on a garbage truck, the first clean screw), or whatever semblance of sanity was possible in a world gone berserk with misery, plague, affinity marketing.”
–"Nate’s Pain Is Now,“ Sam Lipsyte

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”
–Catching the Big Fish, David Lynch