Quote

I might have missed my calling as an editor. In the spring, the sight of my empty garden beds gives me the horticultural equivalent of writers' block: So much space! So many plants to choose among, and yet none of them seem quite right!

Susan Orlean

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Susan Orlean
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 31
Journalist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Seems
Spring
Block
Might
Empty
Bed
Right
Among
Plant
Beds
Many
Choose
Calling
Editor
Giving
Seem
Writers
Equivalent
Much
Gives
None
Plants
Quite
Garden
Missed
Space
Sight
Editors

More quotes by Susan Orlean

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A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.
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I would like to make sleeping my new hobby, except that I'm too tired, really, to have a hobby. But a girl can always dream.
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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.
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In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.
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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.
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I've always been afraid of video games - not afraid that I wouldn't like them, but that I would like them too much, and that after mere seconds in front of any particularly bright and absorbing game, I would abandon all ambition, turn into a mouth-breathing zombie, and develop a wide, sofa-shaped rear end.
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Writing about unknown people means I spend a lot of time arguing to the reader about why it's worth knowing about them. That's challenging, but then the piece is pure discovery.
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I want a chainsaw very badly, because I think cutting down a tree would be unbelievably satisfying. I have asked for a chainsaw for my birthday, but I think I'll probably be given jewelry instead.
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I have worked on PCs and on Macs and, while I have my preferences, I don't find it crippling to work on one rather than the other.
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Among all life forms, there are creatures with charisma and creatures without. It's one of those ineffable qualities we can't quite define, but we all seem to respond similarly to.
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The first thing I think about when I wake up most mornings is the fact that I’m tired.
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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.
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When we stopped to rest and Tony tried to figure out what was wrong with his compass, I asked him what he thought it was about orchids that seduced humans so completely that they were compelled to steal them and worship them and try to breed new and specific kinds of them and then be willing to wait for nearly a decade for one of them to flower.
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If you had really loved something, wouldn't a little bit of it always linger?
Susan Orlean
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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.
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I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done.
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In an interesting inversion of status, the reigning breed in the dog park these days is the really-oddball-unidentifiable-mixed-breed-mutt-found-wandering-the-street or its equivalent. The stranger the mutt the better the more peculiar the circumstance of it coming into your life, the better.
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Dog parks are more cliquish than any other human gathering with the possible exception of seventh grade. Deal with it.
Susan Orlean
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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
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You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.
Susan Orlean