Lyndsie Bourgon

ever tried. ever failed. no matter. try again. fail again. fail better. - samuel beckett (via sodisarmingdarling)

indecision

“Maybe this will make me happy, maybe that will make me happy. I don’t know which one will make me the happiest, so I am confused and unhappy now trying to decide.”

…Williams says, “I just wanted the story to live in the world.” All she did was get creative—the best we can hope for in the fight to save quality journalism. - From a story in Mother Jones about “Radiohead Journalism”

I used to steal chickens. Now I’m a newspaper man. - Fantastic Mr. Fox

telling stories

From Megan Cottrell’s True/Slant blog:

“I have this idea about journalism - that it should be approachable and less “newsy.” I want my stories to make you laugh, cry and draw you in to neighborhoods and situations you don’t deal with every day. I hate the broadcaster voice. I hate TV news. I hate the inverted pyramid. I love surprise. I love humor. I love people and telling their stories.”

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. -

Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That.”

Happy 2010, Farewell 2009.

“That they [women’s magazines] are popular no one can deny, and therefore one’s surprise is all the greater at the triviality of their contents.”

-Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, in the New Republic, on women’s magazines.