Now we’re e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and it warbles to alert me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook or a reply or direct message on Twitter, but it rarely ever rings.
Susan Orlean
I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle – a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own – and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.
Susan Orlean
Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things – the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilarating experience of open space.
Susan Orlean
I’m happy to be reminded that an ordinary day full of nothing but nothingness can make you feel like you’ve won the lottery.
Susan Orlean
My ace in the hole as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it. Whenever I made a new friend, I made a point of finding out his or her birthday early on, and I would record it in my Filofax calendar.
Susan Orlean
Every corny thing that’s said about living with nature – being in harmony with the earth, feeling the cycle of the seasons – happens to be true.
Susan Orlean
Winter in the country is very white. There is black grit on all the shoulders of the roads and on the big mounds from the plows, and all the cars are filthy, but the fields are dazzling and untouched and pristine.
Susan Orlean
I remember three- and four-week-long snow days, and drifts so deep a small child, namely me, could get lost in them. No such winter exists in the record, but that’s how Ohio winters seemed to me when I was little – silent, silver, endless, and dreamy.
Susan Orlean
Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in my town that each individual vote really does matter, and several local races have been decided by as many votes as you can count on one hand.
Susan Orlean
When it comes to consumer electronics, I’m a big fat sucker, because even though I know you should never, ever buy anything until the second version of it is released, I just can’t resist. I live in a state of perpetual Beta.
Susan Orlean
When it comes to consumer electronics, I’m a big fat sucker, because even though I know you should never, ever buy anything until the second version of it is released, I just can’t resist. I live in a state of perpetual Beta.
Susan Orlean
You could go crazy thinking of how unprivate our lives really are – the omnipresent security cameras, the tracking data on our very smart phones, the porous state of our Internet selves, the trail of electronic crumbs we leave every day.
Susan Orlean
I am unusually Halloween-attentive, because, as it happens, I was born on Halloween, so for me it has always been an occasion of great moment.
Susan Orlean
Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it’s all gone sideways.
Susan Orlean
Brave’ is one of those words that has been bleached of most of its meaning these days, thanks to far too many appearances in the glaring light of ad slogans and corporate public relations. I never thought about anything as brave anymore; it just seemed like a flabby, glib cliche.
Susan Orlean
I have no idea how to get in touch with anyone anymore. Everyone, it seems, has a home phone, a cell phone, a regular e-mail account, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, and a Web site. Some of them also have a Google Voice number. There are the sentimental few who still have fax machines.
Susan Orlean
I finally overcame my phobia, and now I approach flying with a sort of studied boredom – a learned habit, thanks to my learn-to-fly-calmly training – but like all former flying phobics, I retain a weird and feverish fascination with aviation news, especially bad news.
Susan Orlean
When I was a kid, phone calls were a premium commodity; only the very coolest kids had a phone line of their own, and long-distance phone calls were made after eleven, when the rates went down, unless you were flamboyant with your spending. Then phone calls became as cheap as dirt and as constant as rain, and I was on the phone all the time.
Susan Orlean
I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done.
Susan Orlean
I don’t turn to greeting cards for wisdom and advice, but they are a fine reflection of the general drift of the culture.
Susan Orlean
When I was a kid, Halloween was strictly a starchy-vegetable-only holiday, with pumpkins and Indian corn on the front stoop; there was nothing electric, nothing inflatable, nothing with latex membranes or strobes.
Susan Orlean
There was a time when I kept track of it all; when my mind worked like a giant lint brush being swept over the fuzzy surface of popular culture. But these days, pop culture seems to have gotten fuzzier and fuzzier; notoriety comes and goes in the snap of a finger.
Susan Orlean
The iPhone calendar isn’t bad, but it isn’t great, either. It only offers a day view and a month view – it doesn’t have a week view, which drives me crazy.
Susan Orlean
Borders had lousy management and made bad corporate decisions, so its fate is less like a terrible accident than a slow-motion slide into a ditch, but it’s hard to be happy about a bookseller’s demise.
Susan Orlean
I’ve loved some gadgets that were not worthy, and I’ve loved gadgets that I would have loved more if I had waited for their developers to figure out how to really make them work, but I loved them anyway.
Susan Orlean
What’s funny is that the idea of popularity – even the use of the word ‘popular’ – is something that had been mostly absent from my life since junior high. In fact, the hallmark of life after junior high seemed to be the shedding of popularity as a central concern.
Susan Orlean
I once had a boyfriend who couldn’t write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties; it was like he was a grown-up reenacter or something.
Susan Orlean
Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn’t know.
Susan Orlean
One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day.
Susan Orlean
I’m always mystified by the day-to-day workings of entities like Twitter that provide framework but not content, but I suppose it could be compared to the U.S. Postal Service, which manages to keep a lot of people employed doing lots of stuff other than writing letters.
Susan Orlean
Places like Hilton Head, with water adjacency and nice climates, are in high demand, and land values are insane. In the case of Hilton Head, which was developed in 1970 on what had been a mosquito- and alligator-infested swampy barrier island, land value has leaped from nearly zero to now unaffordable.
Susan Orlean
When a machine can do something better and faster than a person can, I am happy to let the machine do it.
Susan Orlean
When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.
Susan Orlean
Sometimes I’m dazzled by how modern and fabulous we are, and how easy everything can be for us; that’s the gilded glow of technology, and I marvel at it all the time.
Susan Orlean
I work at home, in the country, and days will go by when, except for my husband and son and the occasional UPS man, the only sentient creatures that see me are my chickens and turkeys.
Susan Orlean
I had forgotten how thrilling a snow day is until my son started school, and as much as he loves it, he swoons at the idea of a free day arriving unexpectedly, laid out like a gift.
Susan Orlean
I wish I had coined the phrase ‘tyranny of choice,’ but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does not make you feel privileged and indulged; too many options make you feel like all of them are wrong, and that you are wrong if you choose any of them.
Susan Orlean
Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.
Susan Orlean
Sometimes, the Internet can feel like a middle-school playground populated by brats in ski masks who name-call and taunt with the fake bravery of the anonymous. But sometimes – thank goodness – it’s nicer than real life.
Susan Orlean
I remember thinking that a girdle was barbaric, and that never in a million years would I treat myself like a sleeping bag being shoved into a stuff sack. Never! Instead, I would run marathons and work out and be in perfect shape and reject the tyranny of the girdle forever.
Susan Orlean
A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.
Susan Orlean
Keeping animals, I have learned, is all about water. Who even knew chickens drank water? I didn’t, but they do, and a lot.
Susan Orlean
I love tearing things out of the ground. I love digging and discarding. I love pruning. In fact, I love pruning so much that I once gave myself carpal-tunnel syndrome because I attacked a trumpet vine with so much dedication.
Susan Orlean
It is hard to imagine Thomas Kinkade as anything less than supremely self-assured.
Susan Orlean
The thing is, I have a zillion apps, and I’m always looking for the perfect arrangement for them, so scrambling my home screen is part of that eternal quest.
Susan Orlean
I’ve tried a lot of different apps to manage Twitter on my phone (I use Hootsuite on my laptop), but I think the official Twitter app is really good.
Susan Orlean
I went to a football school, which meant that I went to a university that served up education and was simultaneously operating a sports franchise.
Susan Orlean
I have long been one of those tedious people who rails against the coronation of ‘student-athletes.’ I have heard the argument that big-time athletics bring in loads of money to universities. I don’t believe the money goes anywhere other than back into the sports teams, but that’s another story.
Susan Orlean
College athletics are so entrenched and enjoyed by so many people that they will never be discontinued or substantially changed. I know that. I just pity the people caught in that tender trap. And most of all, I pity those kids.
Susan Orlean
There will always be vain, obsessive people who want to own rare and extraordinary things whatever the cost; there will always be people for whom owning beautiful, dangerous animals brings a sense of power and magic.
Susan Orlean
States should pass laws making it illegal to own or trade wild animals; the phony ‘educational’ permits that many private owners have used to skirt those laws should be eliminated.
Susan Orlean
In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.
Susan Orlean
Having animals in the city is entirely different from having animals out in the country. For one thing, it’s more social. When you live on lots of acres without neighbors within a stone’s throw, your dog-walks are usually solitary rambles over hill and dale.
Susan Orlean