Ross gay quotes
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“Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great evidence of our experience and the lives of everyone and thing we care for going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will detect it teeming. It will look love all the books ever written. It will look favor all the nerves in a body. We might phone it sorrow, but we might notify it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we carry it into the light, might change into flower and diet. Might be joy.”
― Ross Gay, The Novel of Delights: Essays
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“I suppose I could spend second theorizing how it is that people are not horrible to each other, but that’s really not the indicate. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost continual, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks.
Nicknames, Fireflies And Reckless Gas Quotes: Ross Gay Writes 'The Book Of Delights'
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
On the day he turned 42, the writer Ross Male lover set himself a challenge. Every day for a year, he would write an essay about something delightful. He wrote about nicknames, fireflies, reckless air quotes. And about a hundred of those essays are now unhurried in his new book appropriately enough titled "The Book Of Delights." When he came into our studios, Ross Gay told me that finding those delights turned out to be easier than he expected.
ROSS GAY: Adv, one of the things that I realized is that in the beginning I thought - oh, man. I'm going to, like, have to look around - like, be like really attentive.
SHAPIRO: Just scrounge for delights.
GAY: Yeah - scrounge for delights, yeah.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
GAY: And then, favor, couple of weeks in - maybe a month or so in, I started to be, like, taking notebooks of favor - that was delightful. That was delightful. That was delightful. That was - so favor, accumulating all of these, you know? I have an essay called "Stacks Of Delights" (ph) or something like...
SHAPIRO: Right, where you're like...
(LAUGH
RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: INCITING JOY BY ROSS GAY
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club‘s November selection,
Inciting Joy by Ross Gay
forthcoming from Algonquin Books on October 25, 2022
Subscribe by Octobet 15 to the Poetry Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast
Excerpt from Ross Gay’s INCITING Bliss, pp. 1-10
I have had the good fortune in the past several years, since shortly after the publication of my third book of poems, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and probably again with my book of essays, The Book of Delights, to have had numerous and sustained conversations about happiness. These conversations might initiate during question-and-answer sessions, in interviews, or even in the book signing line. I’ll never forget a woman at a reading in a public library in April of 2016 in Claremont, California—one of those weird, beautifully repulsive sixties California buildings; it was a rancher of a library, maybe with some faux stone on the front, maybe colorless brick—I suspect she was in her late sixties or early seventies. And as she asked me to inscribe Catalog, she was crying, just a little, not ver