Quote

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

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Susan Orlean
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: October 31
Journalist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Mind
Surface
Giant
Lint
Time
Track
Finger
Notoriety
Like
Worked
Giants
Fuzzy
Goes
Pops
Snap
Days
Gotten
Snaps
Culture
Popular
Swept
Comes
Kept
Brush
Seems
Fingers
Brushes

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I love convincing a reader that an unusual or seemingly ordinary subject is worth his or her time - it's part of the fun for me as a writer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.
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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.
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Recently, I have come to assume that any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex, letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination service will occur on its regular schedule. So I usually ignore my home phone.
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The biggest problem with working at a treadmill desk: the compulsion to announce constantly that you are working at a treadmill desk.
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I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.
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Dog parks are more cliquish than any other human gathering with the possible exception of seventh grade. Deal with it.
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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.
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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.
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'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.
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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.
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Here's a habit I never thought I'd develop: I gravitate to anything online that's marked 'most popular' or 'most e-mailed.' And I hate myself a little bit every time I do.
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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.
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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.
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Sense of smell, of course, is only one of those dog qualities that can't be replicated or improved upon. I've been researching dogs in warfare for my book about 'Rin Tin Tin,' and I've read many accounts of their heroics: carrying messages through battle, alerting troops to enemy planes, and even parachuting behind enemy lines.
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