But not the worst thing than can happen.
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‘I’m the one who got away, the one you don’t know; I’m the long hairs you find under your pillow, nested in your drain, tangled in your brush.’
But not the worst thing than can happen.
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Melanie Rae Thon was born in 1957 in Kalispell, Montana. She graduated from the universities of Michigan and Boston, and has lived in Arizona and New York, where she taught in the graduate creative writing program at Syracuse University. She has published three novels, Meteors in August (1990), lona Moon (1993), and Sweet Hearts (2001), and two short story collections, Girls in the Grass (1991) and First, Body (1997). In 1996 she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, and she has twice been a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is currently professor of English at the University of Utah.
More about the author →‘You see that the only thing that seems to move in its atmosphere is dust suspended against a fine thread of sunlight, that time itself sleeps lazily on the stupefied clocks.’
‘If it has ever fallen to you to scatter someone’s ashes, especially those of someone you loved, you might share my sense of the process as tantamount to fly tipping, the stuff resembling nothing so much as cat litter.’
William Atkins on disposing of the dead.
‘My father said there is fate and destiny governing each of our paths, of individuals and of nations, and this only the dead may know.’
Aube Rey Lescure on returning to China.
‘Is there in fact a jostling for dominance between the art forms, some barely suppressed competitiveness?’
Adam Mars-Jones on music and ceremony.
‘It hurt for no particular reason, just as the sun rises each morning and the stars come out each night. ’
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