"Chihulys are the pigeons of Seattle."
- Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette
top of page
As a creative challenge to myself, I’m illustrating one sentence or passage per week from the books I’ve hoarded and underlined throughout the years. Some are funny, some illustrations are painful, some are just interesting facts, and some I don’t know why I underlined in the first place. Each post below includes the selected text, the author and source, and my illustrated interpretation.
Search
“When he asked his last question, what was the moon made of, he heard from the smug children, about green cheese. Some said the moon was made of paper, two said neon light. A vote was taken. The green-cheese children, in their nyah nyah voices, seemed to have chanted everybody down. There remained one unconvinced, iconoclastic child. The moon, she said, in a sensible, lofty tone of pure conviction, is made of grabbedy."
- Renata Adler, Speedboat
When you’re hand-setting every letter, pulling them out of the type cases, which are sort of strangely arranged, and setting them in lines, you have a lot of time to think about the process of production, and about the words you are laboring over.
- Louis Menand, "Notable Quotables," (essay published in The New Yorker)
bottom of page