Carrie Fisher

Sometimes you can only find Heaven by slowly backing away from Hell.

Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking 

The Beths

I thought I was getting better

But I'm right back to where I started

And the straight line was a circle

Yeah the straight line was a lie

Guess I'll take the long way

'Cause every way's the long way

I don't know if I can go around again

—The Beths, "The straight line was a lie" (2025)

Jo Hutton

People who cope best with stress usually have these four things in place for their nervous system (often without even realising.)

They move. Not just spin classes or runs, but also walking round the shops, Dancing in the kitchen. Any way of letting the body use up its energy.

They soothe. Big sighs. Blankets. Swaying. Music. They take time to switch off and get comfy.

They connect. Humans aren't meant to do life alone. We survive in groups. Feeling cut off is stressful — laughing with friends, cuddling family, bonding over hobbies is medicine.

They express. Through art, talking honestly, writing, standing up for yourself. Bottled feelings don't disappear, they sit in the body.

You won't always manage all four. Physical limitations or life circumstances might make one harder than the others sometimes. But they really don't have to be big gestures, in fact keeping it small is often best.

So grab, a piece of paper. Divide it into four boxes. Write down what works for you in each. Keep it simple. The smaller and easier the better.

And get started.

https://substack.com/@johuttonyoga/note/c-147943682?r=4nxn&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Neko Case

Being with good humans who have a common goal also bolsters my secondary immune system that processes and disarms the evil of this world. We make art and music together; a sword that rips through the manufactured body of hate that is forever these days trying to block out the sun, isolate us and eat us alive. We will not lay down our lives to it. Never.

--from her Substack newsletter Entering the Lung, "No News Is Good News," Aug. 18, 2025.  

Briana Ní Loingsigh

In the Irish language, we are not our emotions. We are not sad or anxious. We have sadness or anxiety on us.

To say I am sad, we say tá brón orm - there is sadness on me.

I am anxious, tá imní orm - there is anxiety on me.

The language recognizes these as passing states, not permanent fixtures of who we are.

https://substack.com/@foghlaimeoir/note/c-145061577?r=4nxn&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Barbara Kingsolver

Even by Kingsolver’s standards, Demon Copperhead’s success was “of a different magnitude”. As well as the Pulitzer, she became the only woman to win the Women’s prize twice. Her sales were in a “new stratosphere”. She tells me she has given much of her income away for years. “Material success came gradually. So I had time to learn how to draw a cap on what we need as a family and what we can do with the rest.” So, when “that first royalty cheque came in and our eyes all popped wide open, I thought: ‘I could do something significant with this.’”

--The author being interviewed about a recovery center she has funded with her book sales.  

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/05/the-damage-is-terrifying-barbara-kingsolver-on-trump-rural-america-and-the-recovery-home-funded-by-her-hit-novel 

 

Sonya Philip

You can make something that might not be the realization of everything that you've ever wated, but it still serves its purpose. It's still functional, and you made it, and that's fantastic. And maybe the next one will be closer to what your ideal is. It's...yeah, absolutely a never-ending process of building upon things and working not toward perfection but toward just what you want. 

 

Ioan Marc Jones

A now-famous study by the University of California, Santa Barbara, noted that, in a series of recorded public conversations between men and women, 48 interruptions occurred, 46 of which came from men. The 2024 Women in the Workplace survey by McKinsey found that nearly 40% of women experienced being interrupted or spoken over “more than others” at work, against 20% of men.

Men in public spaces, according to research, talk more than women, talk over women, and talk down to women, contributing to the rise of gender neologisms such as manologuing, bropropriating and mansplaining. 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/26/i-was-one-of-those-men-who-couldnt-stop-talking-heres-how-i-learned-to-shut-up-and-listen 

Matthew Fray

I was arguing about the merits of [leaving] a glass by the sink. But for my wife, it wasn't about the glass. It wasn't about dishes by the sink, or laundry on the floor…It was about consideration. About the pervasive sense that she was married to someone who did not respect or appreciate her. And if I didn't respect or appreciate her, then I didn't love her in a manner that felt trustworthy. She couldn't count on the adult who had promised to love her forever, because none of this dish-by-the-sink business felt anything like being loved.

I now understand that when I left that glass there, it hurt my wife—literally causing pain—because it felt to her as if I had just said, "Hey. I don't respect you or value your thoughts and opinions. Not taking four seconds to put my glass in the dishwasher is more important to me than you are." 

Suddenly, this moment is no longer about something as benign and meaningless as a dirty glass. Now this moment is about a meaningful act of love and sacrifice. My wife knew I was reasonably smart, so she couldn't figure out how I could be so dense after hundreds of these conversations. She began to question whether I was intentionally trying to hurt her and whether I actually loved her at all. 

Here's the thing. A dish by the sink in no way feels painful or disrespectful to a spouse who wakes up every day and experiences a marriage partner who communicates in both word and action how important and cherished their spouse and relationship are. My wife didn't flip shit over a dish by the sink because she's some insufferable nag who had to have her way all the time. My wife communicated pain and frustration over the frequent reminders she encountered that told her over and over and over again just how little she was considered when I made decisions. 

 --From This Is How Your Marriage Ends (2022)

Henry Scott Holland

Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened.

Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you,
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just round the corner.

All is well.
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

Melissa Kirsch

Memorizing a poem is like taking a work of art that you love and letting it live and bloom inside of you.

Perhaps because I started memorizing poems early, before I was forced to do so in school, I never perceived the process as onerous, but rather as a fun challenge, a way to take something I loved and make it a part of me. I love that, amid the practical information and persistent worries and memories good and bad, my mind’s archive contains these bits of beauty, lyrics that float up into consciousness, lovely echoes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/briefing/memory-palace.html

Monica Hesse

On my way to visit the corrosive art, I dropped in on another tour group, this one containing mostly Japanese Americans. On that tour, one tourist gently interrupted the tour guide to ask whether she would like a complete translation of some of the Japanese calligraphy that was written on one of the paintings. The tour guide, who was White, exclaimed delightedly that, yes she would, she would love the full translation. And now she has learned something new about the place where she worked every day, and a painting she walked past every hour.

And that is America. That is how we tell the story of America. Together. Each one of us contributing what we can, and when we learn something new, we think about how wonderful it is to learn it, rather than burying the new information down where it can't hurt us.

--"What exactly does Trump think is in the Smithsonian? Following his most recent executive order, I went in search of some 'corrosive ideology.'" Washington Post, April 2,2025.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/02/trump-art-corrosive-smithsonian-executive-order/

Gift link: https://wapo.st/3GbFUjX

Monica Hesse

On my way to visit the corrosive art that I cannot imagine Trump has actually seen, I dropped in on a school tour where the guide plopped down a bunch of sixth-graders in front of a magnificent portrait of George Washington — the most famous one, the one by Gilbert Stuart— and there she revealed that there are actually multiple versions of this portrait in existence. They're drafts. Some are just sketches; some contain just his face. They're all just rough drafts that got closer and closer to the real thing, as the artist tried his best to capture this complicated man, this founder of our country, this enslaver, this hero. And that is how history is made. Rough drafts, again and again.

"What exactly does Trump think is in the Smithsonian? Following his most recent executive order, I went in search of some 'corrosive ideology.'" Washington Post, April 2,2025.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/02/trump-art-corrosive-smithsonian-executive-order/

Gift link: https://wapo.st/3GbFUjX

Alexander McCall Smith

   "Former people," said Isabel. "I was thinking about the people that the Bolsheviks described as 'former people.' They were anybody whom they regarded as enemies of their revolution. It's such a chilling term. They had no rights to anything, really—no right to work, no property, no freedom. The only right they had was the right to be shot."

   "They actually used the term former people?" asked Andy.

   "Yes," said Isabel. "It's chilling, isn't it? And that sort of attitude has had many followers: Nazis, Pol Pot, Jean Kambanda in Rwanda—it's quite a big club. Deny somebody else's humanity and human worth and you're on a very well worn and familiar road."

—The Conditions of Unconditional Love (2024), p. 76. 

Alexander McCall Smith

She looked at her watch. She could always go back into her study and do some work, but the thought did not appeal. She could watch television, which was something she very rarely did and which seemed a particularly unattractive prospect at the moment. Television was noise, and people being confrontational; it was people shooting one another or finding bodies, or dancing about on the stage in glittery costumes. Television was a cleverly packaged anodyne, Huxley's soma in some respects, but it was not what she needed.

— The Conditions of Unconditional Love (2024), p. 177.