brooklyn

Somehow, some way, every person in the arts has to find an accommodation with disappointment and embarrassment. They are the pollen in the air we breathe.

_you either do or do not have a comedy mind, whatever that is, maybe a heightened sense of the ridiculous and the absurdity of life_We are all crazy and crazed.

When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.

The revelation that personal truth can be the foundation of comedy, that outrageousness can be cleansing and healthy_

It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything _ staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change.

Laughing made me feel safe. I was not going to be enveloped by the seediness that coated this world like dust.

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.

He'd once explained that when he was a boy his very proper parents had forbidden him and his brothers to curse in the house so 'feather buckets' was the young boys coded way of saying 'f*ck it

I had to say it gave me a warm feeling to picture Meredith Winslow spending twenty years or so in an ill fitting orange jumpsuit, cozying up to a great big girl named Beulah

Men were good for one thing only. Killing spiders. Other than that, I was on my own. It was sad though. Where was the chivalry of yesteryear?

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.

They pine for the hip, frosty girlfriend they abandoned for a pleasant if unexciting marriage to her sunnier, less mentally present sister coast.

To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.

We__e all a little broken, on the sidewalk. On the street. In the city.

Maybe it wasn__ rational, but she didn__ like the idea of Leo invading her little world. Yesterday, Brooklyn had belonged to her. The Long Island __urbs where she__ grown up had felt far away from the brick streets and renovated factory spaces of Brooklyn. In this job, she__ felt truly independent, putting down her own fragile roots in a new place. Fast forward twenty-four hours, and her daddy had joined the workplace and her ex-boyfriend had shown up to remind her of all that she__ lost. Really, a girl could be forgiven for feeling slightly hysterical. Not that there was any time to panic.

Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn't happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?