Provincetown Quotes

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My favourite characters are people who think they’re normal but they’re not. I live in Baltimore, and it’s full of people like that. I’ve also lived in New York, which is full of people who think they’re crazy, but they’re completely normal. I get my best material in Baltimore – you get dialogue that you just couldn’t imagine. I asked this guy in a bar what he did for a living and he said he traded deer meat for crack. I never realised that job even existed. You could make a whole movie about that person. And he was kind of cute too, if you could ignore his eyes rolling around his head. Although I did crack once, accidentally, and I thought: Oh my God, what, am I gonna rob my parents now? I prefer poppers – they’re legal in London, right? I used to do them on roller coasters. They’re illegal in Provincetown, which is the gay fishing village where I live in the summer. In the airport there are signs warning you to get rid of your poppers.
John Waters
Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts. The shoulder is at Buzzard's Bay; the elbow at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at Provincetown.
Henry David Thoreau
the ham is in a different dangerous location. It’s in Provincetown.
Rick Riordan (The Hammer of Thor (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, #2))
Oblong stones sink slow and sideways. Shaped by the weight of waves, dutifully vibrating nature’s lunar-bound graces, they wash ashore only for closed palms to forsake them. The cheerful will cherish them, place them on windowsills, or on graves.
Kristen Henderson (Of My Maiden Smoking)
Martha’s Vineyard had fossil deposits one million centuries old. The northern reach of Cape Cod, however, on which my house sat, the land I inhabited—that long curving spit of shrub and dune that curves in upon itself in a spiral at the tip of the Cape—had only been formed by wind and sea over the last ten thousand years. That cannot amount to more than a night of geological time. Perhaps this is why Provincetown is so beautiful. Conceived at night (for one would swear it was created in the course of one dark storm) its sand flats still glistened in the dawn with the moist primeval innocence of land exposing itself to the sun for the first time. Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. One remembered then that the land was only ten thousand years old, and one’s ghosts had no roots. We did not have old Martha’s Vineyard’s fossil remains to subdue each spirit, no, there was nothing to domicile our specters who careened with the wind down the two long streets of our town which curved together around the bay like two spinsters on their promenade to church.   NORMAN MAILER, from Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Michael Cunningham (Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown)
Up until I met these scientists, I thought that mind-wandering—what I was doing in Provincetown so much, and so pleasurably—was the opposite of attention, and that’s why I felt guilty about doing it. I realized I was wrong. It is actually a different form of attention—and a necessary one.
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
Still, I did a double take when I saw the following headline in the Provincetown Banner: PLOVERS CLOSE PARKING LOT. An image flashed through my mind of little birds dragging a chain across the entrance and waving away traffic. I thought it was the silliest thing I had ever seen until I turned the page and read DOG FECES CLOSES BEACHES.
Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature)
It is the Morocco of America, the New Orleans of the north.
Michael Cunningham (Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown)
If I die tomorrow, Provincetown is where I’d want my ashes scattered. Who knows why we fall in love, with places or people, with objects or ideas? Thirty centuries of literature haven’t begun to solve the mystery; nor have they in any way slaked our interest in it. Provincetown is a mysterious place, and those of us who love it tend to do so with a peculiar, inscrutable intensity.
Michael Cunningham (Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown)
Lewis’s first novel appeared in November 1912 under the pseudonym of Tom Graham, because Lewis regarded it as a pot boiler, which was written quickly to pay the bills rather than for any artistic endeavour. It had an initial print run of 1,000 copies and sold less than 800 of those. Lewis later revealed that it was written “on a wharf in Provincetown, Mass. on a vacation from my bosses”.
Sinclair Lewis (Delphi Collected Works of Sinclair Lewis (Illustrated))
THE PILGRIM MOTHERS AND FATHERS Provincetown’s first settlers were, in fact, the Pilgrims, who sailed the Mayflower into Provincetown Harbor in 1620. They spent the winter there but, finding too little fresh water, sailed that spring to Plymouth, which has gone into the history books as the Pilgrims’ initial point of disembarkation. Provincetown is, understandably, not happy about this misrepresentation of the facts.
Michael Cunningham (Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown)
I’m going to kill you.” “Could you kiss me first?” Reese murmured, extending her good hand. Tory moved between Reese’s parted legs, resting her palm on Reese’s thigh for support. “Hmm, I suppose.” “Then I’ll go happy.
Radclyffe (Beyond the Breakwater (Provincetown Tales, #2))
That summer, in a small house near the beach, he began to write a book. He knew it would be the last thing he ever did, so he decided to write something advocating a crazy, preposterous idea—one so outlandish that nobody had ever written a book about it before. He was going to propose that gay people should be allowed to get married, just like straight people. He thought this would be the only way to free gay people from the self-hatred and shame that had trapped Andrew himself. It’s too late for me, he thought, but maybe it will help the people who come after me. When the book—Virtually Normal—came out a year later, Patrick died when it had only been in the bookstores for a few days, and Andrew was widely ridiculed for suggesting something so absurd as gay marriage. Andrew was attacked not just by right-wingers, but by many gay left-wingers, who said he was a sellout, a wannabe heterosexual, a freak, for believing in marriage. A group called the Lesbian Avengers turned up to protest at his events with his face in the crosshairs of a gun. Andrew looked out at the crowd and despaired. This mad idea—his last gesture before dying—was clearly going to come to nothing. When I hear people saying that the changes we need to make in order to deal with depression and anxiety can’t happen, I imagine going back in time, to the summer of 1993, to that beach house in Provincetown, and telling Andrew something: Okay, Andrew, you’re not going to believe me, but this is what’s going to happen next. Twenty-five years from now, you’ll be alive. I know; it’s amazing; but wait—that’s not the best part. This book you’ve written—it’s going to spark a movement. And this book—it’s going to be quoted in a key Supreme Court ruling declaring marriage equality for gay people. And I’m going to be with you and your future husband the day after you receive a letter from the president of the United States telling you that this fight for gay marriage that you started has succeeded in part because of you. He’s going to light up the White House like the rainbow flag that day. He’s going to invite you to have dinner there, to thank you for what you’ve done. Oh, and by the way—that president? He’s going to be black.
Johann Hari (Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions)
We have heard that a few days after this, when the Provincetown Bank was robbed, speedy emissaries from Provincetown made particular inquiries concerning us at this lighthouse. Indeed, they traced us all the way down the Cape, and concluded that we came by this unusual route down the back side and on foot in order that we might discover a way to get off with our booty when we had committed the robbery. The Cape is so long and narrow, and so bare withal, that it is well-nigh impossible for a stranger to visit it without the knowledge of its inhabitants generally, unless he is wrecked on to it in the night. So, when this robbery occurred, all their suspicions seem to have at once centered on us two travelers who had just passed down it. If we had not chanced to leave the Cape so soon, we should probably have been arrested. The real robbers were two young men from Worcester County who traveled with a centre-bit, and are said to have done their work very neatly. But the only bank that we pried into was the great Cape Cod sand-bank, and we robbed it only of an old French crown piece, some shells and pebbles, and the materials of this story.
Henry David Thoreau (The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Excursions, Translations, and Poems)
But high school ends. Remember that, even when it feels eternal. And when it ends, there are places to go. The Village, Provincetown, San Francisco. Pockets of cities and towns where boys take boys to dances and dance their nights away, writhing their bodies against each other in a primal effort to shed all the trauma of their past. Places where girls settle down with girls, places where boys can dress like girls on the street and get high-fives instead of fists against their gorgeous faces. Maybe someday high school will change. But if it doesn't, then just remember that high school ends.
Abdi Nazemian (Like a Love Story)
If you’re asleep, you’re not spending money, so you’re not consuming anything. You’re not producing any products.” He explained that “during the last recession [in 2008]…they talked about global output going down by so many percent, and consumption going down. But if everybody were to spend [an] extra hour sleeping [as they did in the past], they wouldn’t be on Amazon. They wouldn’t be buying things.” If we went back to sleeping a healthy amount—if everyone did what I did in Provincetown—Charles said, “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people. The attentional failures are just roadkill. That’s just the cost of doing business.
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again)
from Labor Day through Halloween, the place is almost unbearably beautiful. The air during these weeks seems less like ether and more like a semisolid, clear and yet dense somehow, as if it were filled with the finest imaginable golden pollen. The sky tends toward brilliant ice-blue, and every thing and being is invested with a soft, gold-ish glow. Tin cans look good in this light; discarded shopping bags do. I’m not poet enough to tell you what the salt marsh looks like at high tide. I confess that when I lived year-round in Provincetown, I tended to become irritable toward the end of October, when one supernal day after another seemed to imply that the only reasonable human act was to abandon your foolish errands and plans, go outside, and fall to your knees.
Michael Cunningham (Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown)
Provincetown is by nature a destination. It is the land’s end; it is not en route to anywhere else. One of its charms is the fact that those who go there have made some effort to do so. Provincetown is three miles long and just slightly more than two blocks wide. Two streets run its entire length from east to west: Commercial, a narrow one-way street where almost all the businesses are, and Bradford, a more utilitarian two-way street a block north of Commercial. Residential roads, some of them barely one car wide, run at right angles on a semiregular grid between Commercial and Bradford streets and then, north of Bradford, meander out into dunes or modest hollows of surviving forest, as the terrain dictates. Although the town has been there since before 1720 (the year it was incorporated) and has survived any number of disastrous storms, it is still possible that a major hurricane, if it hit head-on, would simply sweep everything away, since Provincetown has no bedrock, no firm purchase of any kind. It is a city of sand, more or less the way Arctic settlements are cities of ice.
Michael Cunningham (Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown)
In a sense Provincetown is a beach. If you stand on the shore watching the tide recede, you are merely that much closer to the water and that much more available to weather than you would be in the middle of town. All along the bay side, the entire length of town, the beach slopes gently, bearded with kelp and dry sea grass. Because Provincetown stands low on the continental shelf, it is profoundly affected by tides, which can exceed a twelve-foot drop at the syzygy of sun, moon, and earth. Interludes of beach that are more than a hundred yards wide at low tide vanish entirely when the tide is high. The water of the bay is utterly calm in most weathers and warmer than that of the ocean beaches, but this being the North Atlantic, no water anywhere is ever what you could rightfully call warm, not even in August. Except in extreme weather the bay beach is entirely domesticated, the backyard of the town, never empty but never crowded, either; there is no surf there, and the water that laps docilely up against the shore is always full of boats. The bay beach is especially good for dogs
Michael Cunningham (Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown)
The Outer Cape is famous for a dazzling quality of light that is like no other place on Earth. Some of the magic has to do with the land being surrounded by water, but it’s also because that far north of the equator, the sunlight enters the atmosphere at a low angle. Both factors combine to leave everything it bathes both softer and more defined. For centuries writers, poets, and fine artists have been trying to capture its essence. Some have succeeded, but most have only sketched its truth. That’s no reflection of their talent, because no matter how beautiful the words or stunning the painting, Provincetown’s light has to be experienced. The light is one thing, but there is also the way everything smells. Those people lucky enough to have experienced the Cape at its best—and most would agree it’s sometime in the late days of summer when everything has finally been toasted by the sun—know that simply walking on the beach through the tall seagrass and rose hip bushes to the ocean, the air redolent with life, is almost as good as it gets. If in that moment someone was asked to choose between being able to see or smell, they would linger over their decision, realizing the temptation to forsake sight for even one breath of Cape Cod in August. Those aromas are as lush as any rain forest, as sweet as any rose garden, as distinct as any memory the body holds. Anyone who spent a week in summer camp on the Cape can be transported back to that spare cabin in the woods with a single waft of a pine forest on a rainy day. Winter alters the Cape, but it doesn’t entirely rob it of magic. Gone are the soft, warm scents of suntan oil and sand, replaced by a crisp, almost cruel cold. And while the seagrass and rose hips bend toward the ground and seagulls turn their backs to a bitter wind, the pine trees thrive through the long, dark months of winter, remaining tall over the hibernation at their feet. While their sap may drain into the roots and soil until the first warmth of spring, their needles remain fragrant through the coldest month, the harshest storm. And on any particular winter day on the Outer Cape, if one is blessed enough to take a walk in the woods on a clear, cold, windless day, they will realize the air and ocean and trees all talk the same language and declare We are alive. Even in the depths of winter: we are alive. It
Liza Rodman (The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer)
Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.
Michael Cunningham (Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown)
It would take another twenty-seven years before the first government-authorized lifesaving stations were erected on Cape Cod. In all, nine stations were built from Race Point in Provincetown to Monomoy Island in Chatham. These two-story wooden structures were put up in the sunbaked dunes away from the high-water mark, thus protecting them from floods. They were painted a deep red and carried sixty-foot flags to make them easily recognizable from the ocean. The stations were manned by up to seven surfmen from August 1 to June 1 of the following year. The station’s keeper kept a watchful eye for the remaining two months. The keeper earned $200 per year for his duties while the surfmen were paid $65 a month. Each surfman, no matter how many years of service, was obligated to pass a strenuous physical examination at the dawn of each new season. Writer J. W. Dalton described the surfman’s weekly routine in his 1902 book, The Life Savers of Cape Cod: “On Monday the members of the crew are employed putting the station in order.
Michael J. Tougias (The Finest Hours: The True Story of the U.S. Coast Guard's Most Daring Sea Rescue)
James Williams was right: our attention is a kind of light, one that clarifies the world and makes it visible to us. In Provincetown I could see more clearly than I ever had before in my life - my own thoughts, my own goals, my own dreams. I want to live in that light - the light of knowing, of achieving our ambitions, of being fully alive - and not in the menacing orange light of it all burning down.
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again)
On the beach in the center of Provincetown, just off the long strip of Commercial Street, there is a comically large wooden blue chair that faces the ocean. It must be eight feet tall, as if it is waiting for a giant. I would often sit on that chair, looking tiny as darkness fell, talking with people I had befriended around the town. Sometimes we would be silent, and simply watch the light change. The light in Provincetown is unlike the light anywhere else I have ever been. You are on a thin, narrow sandbar in the middle of the ocean, and as you sit on that beach, you are facing east. The sun is setting behind you in the west—but its light is flowing forward, onto the water in front of you, and reflecting back into your face. You seem to be flooded with the waning light of two sunsets. I watched it with the people I met, and I felt radically open, to them, and to the sun, and to the ocean.
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
Back when I was a messenger for Standard Oil in Rockefeller Center, I worked with another guy there named John Cazale. He was a few years older than me, lean looking, with a low-key manner. He had a modesty about him, but also a sense of reality, a groundedness about how the world really worked. He seemed to know something about everything. My grasp of the state of global affairs was that Hitler was gone and that was a good thing. Other than that, I had no idea what was going on. Johnny would be reading The New York Times, understanding every issue and making it comprehensible to me. At least, he tried. To my great surprise, when I showed up in Provincetown to start rehearsals for the play, there was John Cazale, who had been hired to take over the role of the Indian. He was the sweetest man ever, but he had a unique way that he liked to rehearse. He did not just simply want to run lines. When you did a scene with John, you’d start talking through the scene, and he would question every line, every word choice. It was an interrogation. He’d say to you, “What am I doing? I’m standing here. What do I think of that? I don’t know what I think of that.” They call it the unconscious narrative. And this is how he was. Then before you knew it, as you kept talking and talking and talking, you’d just slip into the scene with him. There’s a certain trust that comes with acting, like tightrope walking. With John, I knew that I had found a scene partner for life.
Al Pacino (Sonny Boy)
We think of the Pilgrims as resilient adventurers upheld by unwavering religious faith, but they were also human beings in the midst of what was, and continues to be, one of the most difficult emotional challenges a person can face: immigration and exile. Less than a year later, another group of English settlers arrived at Provincetown Harbor and were so overwhelmed by this “naked and barren place” that they convinced themselves that the Pilgrims must all be dead. In fear of being forsaken by the ship’s captain, the panicked settlers began to strip the sails from the yards “lest the ship should get away and leave them.
Nathaniel Philbrick (Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War)
There are no fools... or rules. It's Provincetown!
Jacob Z. Flores (When Love Takes Over (Provincetown, #1))
By the 1960s, Provincetown had been discovered by the world beyond the artist community. Norman Mailer described it to Jackie Kennedy as “the Wild West of the East.
Liza Rodman (The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer)
we are, collectively, experiencing “a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.” When I read this, I realized what I had experienced in Provincetown. I was—for the first time in my life—living within the limits of my attention’s resources. I was absorbing as much information as I could actually process, think about, and contemplate—and no more. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose. Sune is a smiling, affable Dane,
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
I could see reminders of why I had cast aside my phone in the first place. I sat in Café Heaven, a lovely little place in the West End of Provincetown, and ate an eggs Benedict. Next to me there were two men in, I guess, their mid-twenties. I shamelessly eavesdropped on their conversation while pretending to read David Copperfield. It was clear they had met on an app, and this was the first time they had seen each other in person. Something about their conversation seemed odd to me, and I couldn’t place it at first. Then I realized they weren’t, in fact, having a conversation at all. What would happen is the first one, who was blond, would talk about himself for ten minutes or so. Then the second one, who was dark-haired, would talk about himself for ten minutes. And they alternated in this way, interrupting each other. I sat next to them for two hours, and at no point did either of them ask the other person a question. At one point, the dark-haired man mentioned that his brother had died a month before. The blond didn’t even offer a cursory “I’m so sorry to hear that”; he simply went back to talking about himself. I realized that if they had met up simply to read out their own Facebook status updates to each other in turn, there would have been absolutely no difference. I felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention—it’s where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego. I don’t say this with any sense of superiority. I am embarrassed to describe what I realized in that week that I missed most about the web. Every day in my normal life—sometimes several times a day—I would look at Twitter and Instagram to see how many followers I had. I didn’t look at the feed, the news, the buzz—just my own stats. If the figure had gone up, I felt glad—like a money-obsessed miser checking the state of his personal stocks and finding he was slightly richer than yesterday. It was as if I was saying to myself, See? More people are following you. You matter. I didn’t miss the content of what they said. I just missed the raw numbers, and the sense that they were growing.
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
Many forces, both within ourselves and in the environment, stand in the way” of flow. In the late 1980s, he discovered that staring at a screen is one of the activities we take part in that on average provides the lowest amount of flow. (He warned that “surrounded by an astonishing panoply of recreational gadgets…most of us go on being bored and vaguely frustrated.”) But as I reflected on this in Provincetown, I realized that even though I had set aside my screens, I was still making a basic mistake. “To have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it,” Mihaly has explained. “We also need a positive goal; otherwise why keep going?
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
I felt myself falling into a different rhythm. I realized then that to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow. After three months in Provincetown, I had written 92,000 words of my novel. They might be terrible, but in one sense, I didn’t care. The reason why became clear to me when one day, shortly before I left Provincetown, I placed my deck chair in the ocean so the sea was lapping at my feet and I finished the third volume of War and Peace. As I closed its last page, I realized I had been sitting there for most of the day. I had been reading like this, day after day, for weeks. And I thought suddenly: It came back! My brain came back! I feared my brain had been broken, and this experiment might just reveal I was a permanently degenerated blob. But I could see now that healing was possible. I cried with relief.
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
Remember where you are, Trooper,” Chief Marshall reminded him. “This is Provincetown. Residents let their freak flag fly around here. If we investigated everyone’s sexual predilections around town, Lord knows what else we’d find.
Casey Sherman (Helltown: The Untold Story of Serial Murder on Cape Cod)
You’ve got two violin sections, violas, cellos, basses, woodwinds, brass, percussion—but it operates as a whole. It has rhythms.” You need space in your life for the spotlight of focus—but alone, it would be like a solo oboe player on a bare stage, trying to play Beethoven. You need mind-wandering to activate the other instruments and to make the sweetest music. I thought I had come to Provincetown to learn to focus. I realized that, in fact, I was learning to think—and that required much more than the spotlight of focus.
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
Food is language; cuisine is a dialect.
Odale Cress (Cuisine is a Dialect, A Leisurely Stroll Through the Edible History of Provincetown)
Bon VoyApetit!
Odale Cress (Cuisine is a Dialect, A Leisurely Stroll Through the Edible History of Provincetown)
Some may go so far as to label these pleasures vices, but I would not, for what is a vice after all, but a pleasure with a bad reputation?
Odale Cress (Cuisine is a Dialect, A Leisurely Stroll Through the Edible History of Provincetown)
I unpacked my books and began to flick through them. I couldn’t get any traction with the one I picked up. I left it aside and walked over toward the ocean. It was early in the Provincetown season, and there were only around six other people that I could see in any direction stretching for miles. I felt then a sudden certainty—you only get these feelings a few times in a lifetime—that I had done absolutely the right thing. For so long I had been fixing my gaze on things that were very fast and very temporary, like a Twitter feed. When you fix your gaze on the speedy, you feel pensive, amped-up, liable to be washed away if you don’t move, wave, shout. Now I found myself staring at something very old and very permanent. This ocean was here long before you, I thought, and it will be here long after your small concerns are forgotten. Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego—it loves you, it hates you, it’s talking about you right now. The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It’s never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
in 1620, when the pilgrims landed at what is now Provincetown at the lower tip of Cape Cod, they found the potable water they had been looking for, but they also found a near continuous span of well-spaced mature trees. By the early 1800s, however, the entire cape had been clearcut for settlement and sheep herding, with nary a tree remaining.
Douglas W. Tallamy (Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard)
Fantasies are like extra cash, they need to be banked for later use. I chuckle to myself, remembering Quentin Tarantino’s hilarious line onstage when I interviewes him in the Provincetown Film Festival. ‘What was the best thing about your success?’ I had asked, and he answered, ‘Pussy… no, the memory of pussy'.
John Waters (Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America)
If the spirit of a place has anything to do with what a poet makes, then it must be the intensity of light (two f-stops brighter than New York) and the extreme geography that so infuse the mind in Provincetown and make one more reflective. With all that jazzed-up light, the excitement of photons bounding off water and sand, even the ordinary air says, Notice me. … the function of art is to wake us up to the very life we are living.
Alison Hawthorne Deming (Writing the Sacred into the Real)
Coming home When we’re driving, in the dark, On the long road To Provincetown, which lies empty For miles, when we’re weary, When the buildings And the scrub pines lose Their familiar look, I imagine us rising From the speeding car, I imagine us seeing everything from another place-the top Of one of the pale dunes Or the deep and nameless fields of the sea- And what we see is the world That cannot cherish us But which we cherish, And what we see is our life Moving like that, Along the dark edges Of everything- the headlights Like lanterns Sweeping the blackness- Believing in a thousand Fragile and unprovable things, Looking out for sorrow, Slowing down for happiness, Making all the right turns Right down to the thumping Barriers to the sea, The swirling waves, The narrow streets, the houses, The past, the future, The doorway that belongs To you and me.
Mary Oliver
Deakin假文凭【咨询办理Q微:202-6614433】如何在澳办(迪肯大学毕业证本科硕士文凭)一模一样毕业证,去哪办澳洲Deakin毕业证成绩单认证书。 JKSHKJSSKJSKJSSJSSSBSVBSSVSB David Hoon Kim is a Korean-born American educated in France, who took his first creative writing workshop at the Sorbonne before attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Stegner Program. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Brins d'éternité, Le Sabord and XYZ La revue de la nouvelle. He has been awarded fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the MacDowell Colony and the Elizabeth George Foundation, among others. Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost is his first book. He writes in English and in French.
如何在澳办(迪肯大学毕业证本科硕士文凭)一模一样毕业证,去哪办澳洲Deakin毕业证成绩单认证书
If we went back to sleeping a healthy amount—if everyone did what I did in Provincetown—Charles said, “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people. The attentional failures are just roadkill. That’s just the cost of doing business.
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)