If everything structural was taken away from me–the screens, houses, shops, cars, phones–what would I have? What would I want? I can only meekly say: I’d have my body, my voice. – Ken Bauman at HTMLGiant

If you want to do any work that matters you have to let go of being loved by everyone. – Stephen Elliott at TFT

(T)he truth about impact journalism is that it requires that you ignore the nuance and the contradictory nature of truth. You have to pick a side and hammer against an obvious outrage and get out clean. – David Simon at California Magazine

We go through life most days, unsure of our usefulness, unsure of why we’re here and for how long, and so to have purpose guiding your days, well there is liberation there. It’s strange but true: by feeling and acting obligated to our fellow humans, we are freed. – Dave Eggers from The Enough Moment.

It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn’t some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. It’s hard to make this case, though, if all we do is squabble with each other and lament our obscurity. – Steve Almond at The Rumpus

(T)he Web can you leave you feeling lonelier, once you turn off the computer. Fiction and poetry connect you, or they can, to something bigger and quieter and more lasting than the day you had at work. – Lorin Stein at the The Atlantic

Why not me  down the street hanging out with my dementia-struck father who does not remember me anymore but probably has only years or a year or months or weeks or minutes left to live. Everyone does. Why am I not with everyone. – Blake Butler at HTMLGIANT

The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. – Dear Sugar on women writers at The Rumpus

Every day is a gift. I am probably wasting that gift. – Roxane Gay on writing at Bent Country

Everyone is merging into one voiceless narrator with the same slang and the same profanity and the same popular cultural references. – Stephen Elliott on Tao Lin at The Rumpus