Erin McKean Quotes
Most popular Erin McKean Quotes
Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked "female".
A good definition is like a good poem: beautiful and worthwhile in itself.
This is a little-known technological fact about the Internet. . .the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm.
A definition is as convention-bound as a sonnet and usually more compact. Writing one is considered, at least by anyone who has ever tried it, something of an art.
If we stop pretending definitions are science, we can enjoy them as a kind of literature—think of them as extremely nerdy poems—without burdening them with tasks for which they are unsuited.
I like to say that dictionaries are the vodka of literature. We take the wheat and the rye and the potatoes—we take really meaty things—and we make it into something that's odorless, colorless, tasteless, but really powerful.
