Kate Bartolotta
- What I Learned from 50 Naked People
Your successes hold your shoulders high. Your losses pull your chest inward. You hold your sadness in your throat, your anger in your jaw and your fear in your belly. Your happiness rises and falls in your chest. Love rolls in and out on the tides of your breath. It's all there, all the time.
The Oatmeal
- Running and the Purple Drink
There are few experiences in life which I would describe as religious. This purple drink was one of them. It tasted like the souls of ten thousand unborn panda bears. It tasted like someone stole the balls off a pegasus and blended them into a smoothie. It tasted like sugar, water, and absolution. It tasted good.
Chris Bucholz
- Travel Myths
As a fairly experienced spoiler of great world cities, I've absorbed more than a bit of traveling wisdom, and one of the things that still surprises me most is how many people do it wrong. There's a huge number of misconceptions people have about the simple act of visiting a place and drinking all its beer.
George R. R. Martin
- Littlefinger - The Climb
Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse. They cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.
Felix Clay
- The Best Lies
The best lies are the ones that you cling to like a desperate little koala, hoping against hope that your idiot lie doesn't fall right out of that fabricated eucalyptus tree and bash your skull on every branch of mistruth and bullshittery on the way down.
Soren Bowie
- Tribute to Human Failure
We like winners. We build monuments to them, name three-day weekends after their triumphs, and carve their faces into mountainsides. It's the successful that we bother to remember, passing their stories through generations, ensuring that winning is the closest anyone will ever get to immortality. But every once in a while, someone suffers such an unparalleled failure that we have no choice but to look up and take notice.
Steve Theiss
- A Moment In My Utopia
In my utopia, everyone will be issued a gun and a canary. The canary is there to sing to warn people in case the levels of methane and carbon dioxide in the air become dangerous. The gun is to shoot the canary if it becomes too annoying.
David Wong
- What is the Monkeysphere?
Train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.
Luke McKinney
- Email
Email is like your mouth: You can use it to give very special attention to one person, or communicate with a group, but some people insist on vomiting all over the entire world. They put their entire address book into the CC field because this list of ten thousand jokes about cute kittens who found Jesus is the one that will make them less alone.
Tom Pappalardo
- Shy
Have you ever stopped to consider that what you call shyness might just be ego? Perhaps your anxiety over how others might perceive you is just a coward's version of vanity.
Luke McKinney
- Apathy
Apathy is without question the worst mental state. Lunatic near-genocidal hatred put men on the moon. Lust led to some of the greatest artworks in history. Greed has driven more technology than gasoline (with an awful lot of overlap). Apathy is how you tell your parents they should have masturbated.
Dave Eggers
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
To glance is not enough; eyes and brains together, acting like a flock of ravenous birds, flapping, tearing, poking... I know everything about people when I look at them for only a moment. I can tell from their clothes, their walks, their hair and hands, I know all the bad things that they've done. I know how they've failed and how they will fail and how miserable they are.
James Joyce
- Ulysses
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
