A. After midnight, every thought feels like a revelation and every revelation feels suspect by morning.
B. Before I learned to write I learned to delete, and deleting taught me more about sentences than any teacher ever did.
C. Coffee is the only constant in a life that changes its opinions every season.
D. Discipline is what you do when inspiration is not watching.
E. Every book I have not read sits on my shelf like an accusation.
F. Forgetting is not failure; forgetting is the mind’s way of making room for the things that matter, which means something in my life currently matters less than I thought it did.
G. Good prose is invisible; great prose makes you forget you are reading at all.
H. Home is not a place; home is the person who does not make you explain yourself.
I. I write because speaking requires an audience and writing requires only a page.
J. Jealousy is just admiration with its volume turned up too high.
K. Knowing when to stop is a skill I have never mastered, which is why this list has twenty-six entries.
L. Late at night, the internet feels like a confession booth where nobody is listening.
M. Memory is a collaborative fiction we tell ourselves until we believe it.
N. Nothing makes you feel more alive than almost dying, and nothing makes you feel more dead than almost living.
O. Open tabs are the physical manifestation of intentions we will never follow through on.
P. Perfectionism is just fear wearing a business casual outfit.
Q. Questions are more honest than answers because questions admit they do not know.
R. Reading a book for the second time is like visiting a city you used to live in: everything is familiar and everything is different.
S. Silence is not empty; silence is full of words that did not make it out.
T. The best time to start was a year ago; the second best time is right after you stop reading this sentence.
U. Under every confident paragraph is a deleted draft that said the opposite.
V. Vulnerability is not weakness; vulnerability is the courage to let someone see the draft before the edits.
W. Writing is the only way I know to think clearly, which means most of my life is spent thinking in fog.
X. Xenophobia is just fear that has been given a vocabulary.
Y. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, which is terrifying if you spend most of your time alone with your own thoughts.
Z. Zzz - the sound of a mind finally quiet enough to rest, which is the only thing this list has been leading toward all along.