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Ben Dolnick
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For a long time, since story collections look almost precisely like novels, I presumed that they were meant to be enjoyed in the same way as novels.
- Ben Dolnick
#Long Time
#Long
#Look
#Time
#Way
Beginning in middle school, the era of wide-margined, Bible-paged anthologies, short stories develop unpromising associations - and these associations often linger through college, when stories become the things distributed in Xeroxes missing entire pages of line-endings.
- Ben Dolnick
#Beginning
#Missing
#Often
#School
#Short
Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don't begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don't become ways of distracting myself from the glum inescapability of actual work.
- Ben Dolnick
#Long
#Myself
#Mysterious
#Two
#Work
I've sold all but one of my microphones, put away my mini-notebooks, stopped scouring the Internet for scraps of wisdom.
- Ben Dolnick
#Away
#Internet
#Put
#Scraps
#Wisdom
Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.
- Ben Dolnick
#Game
#Hard Work
#Lunch
#Me
#Work
Literary interviews are inevitably packed with the nuts and bolts of how writers do their work, and there's very little that aspiring writers do more readily than fling other people's nuts and bolts into their toolboxes.
- Ben Dolnick
#Interviews
#More
#Nuts
#People
#Work
Enrichment happened to be my favorite time of day in the Children's Zoo, since it offered relief from the security-guard-esque standing around that makes up most of a zookeeper's day.
- Ben Dolnick
#Children
#Day
#Standing
#Time
#Zoo
Penelope Fitzgerald's nine novels are thin enough that if you were so inclined, you could take her entire literary output down from the shelf with a single stretched hand. You'd be holding an eclectic bunch.
- Ben Dolnick
#Down
#Enough
#Her
#Shelf
#Take
Books like Munro's are so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it feels like a violation to subject them to the crude business of committee meetings and PR releases; you might as well storm a butterfly den with a klieg light.
- Ben Dolnick
#Business
#Butterfly
#Light
#Meetings
A social worker named Cosette Rae, along with a therapist named Hilarie Cash, founded 'ReSTART' in what, until then, had been Rae's house.
- Ben Dolnick
#Along
#Cash
#House
#Social
#Until
In life, we like tranquility; in books, we love tension.
- Ben Dolnick
#Life
#Like
#Love
#Tension
#Tranquility
Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.
- Ben Dolnick
#Existence
#Find
#Her
#Reading
#Us
In the Children's Zoo, Enrichment meant presenting the goats with a trash can smeared with peanut butter or dangling keys at the end of a broomstick in front of the cow. The goats would knock their heads around the inside of the can and emerge giddy, peanut butter drunk.
- Ben Dolnick
#Children
#Cow
#Drunk
#End
#Zoo
True atonement isn't the periodic shaving of karmic stubble via confessional; it requires deep, truthful change. It means doing the hardest thing of all: not making the same stupid mistake again.
- Ben Dolnick
#Change
#Doing
#Mistake
#Stupid
#True
When I started researching the eco effects of eating meat, I'd assumed, for no good reason, that environmental irresponsibility would correspond to both animal size and deliciousness: Eating cows would be worst, eating pigs would be a bit less bad, and eating chickens would be basically harmless.
- Ben Dolnick
#Bad
#Eating
#Environmental
#Good
#Reason
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