Alexander Chee

You turn the cards face-up as you lay them out, one by one, and consider the symbolism of each, as well as the fleeting impressions you get as you hold a card in your hand. Each card acts as a separate scene or chapter within a larger story, and as you go through the reading, you create a relationship between them. In that sense, it is, whatever truth it tells you, a terrific narrative exercise.

Perhaps the only way to escape your fate is not to know it.

The writer Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that day “the consolations of the mask,” where you make a place that doesn’t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory. But I didn’t know this then.

This, it seems to me, is why we have teachers.

Lipstick crowns the golden Marlboro filter.