Glass Half Empty

"When kids are praised from being 'mature,' that often means they're bottling up big feelings or not making messes or not needing a lot of help . . . but kids need to have big feelings, they need to make messes, and they need to be able to ask for help. 'Mature' kids often grow into very anxious adults."

~~ from Glass Half Empty by Rachel Smith

life, Charlie, not literature

"Twenty years ago in the hands of the law, he had wrestled with the cops. They had forced him into a straight jacket. He had had diarrhea in the police wagon as they rushed him to Bellevue. They were trying to cope, to do something with a poet. What did the New York police know about poets! They knew drunks and muggers, they knew rapists, they knew women in labor and hopheads, but they were at sea with poets. Then he had called me from a phone booth in the hospital. And I had answered from the hot grimy flaking dressing room a the Belasco. And he had yelled, 'This is life, Charlie, not literature!' . . . [W]hen Humboldt cried, 'Life!' . . . [h]e only meant realistic, naturalistic life. As if art hid the truth and only the sufferings of the mad revealed it."

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

verboten

"Unfortunately Charlie was not sober, strictly speaking, nor had he been sober for the previous six months. On the contrary: now that he was no longer drinking, he was taking more pills than ever. As he'd later admit to AA (claiming he didn't realize, at the time, that it was verboten): 'I couldn't meet a friend for lunch, I couldn't write a line, I couldn't attend an AA meeting, without the help of these drugs.'"

~~ from Blake Bailey's Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of                                           Charles Jackson