Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.

It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.