Sometimes there are good reasons to be literal

Elsie glared at him. "Do you always have to be so literal?"

Homer gave her question some though, then said, "Maybe it's a coal mining thing. If you don't look at the roof literally, it might fall literally on top of your head."

Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), p. 309

Facing racism can be scary for whites

These are very scary times for a lot of people who are just now realizing that America is not, and has never been, the melting-pot utopia that their parents and teachers told them it was. These are very scary times for those who are just now realizing how justifiably hurt, angry, and terrified so many people of color have been all along. These are very stressful times for people of color who have been fighting and yelling and trying to protect themselves from a world that doesn't care, to suddenly be asked by those who've ignored them for so long, "What has been happening your entire life? Can you educate me?" Now that we're all int he room, how do we start this discussion?

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p. 5

What's the best place to write?

Whether you work in an airy studio, a stone tower, a bathroom, or even a bed, there is no "right" place for writing. The best place to write is anywhere you do.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 38

You can have your gender

Perhaps we should pause here for a moment and clarify something that I'm often asked about and that seems to be a point of grave misunderstanding. I don't want to take away your gender. I don't want to abolish gender roles, or even gender rules. I do want to abolish gender assumptions, and therein lies the most exciting part of my identity: I am a metaphor. I am not a metaphor for how "you too can be genderfluid." If you aren't inherently fluid, I would never suggest that you try to be or you pretend to be. I'm a metaphor for being free, for a grander ideal. I am a walking, breathing representation of the fruits of self-acceptance.

Jeffrey Marsh, "Life Threats," in Micah Rajunov & Scott Duane eds., Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), p. 76

It looked like infectious diseases were conquered

Writing in the heady days of new antibiotics and immunizations, esteemed microbiologists Macfarlane Burnet and David White predicted in 1972 that “the most likely forecast about the future of infectious diseases is that it will be very dull.”¹ They acknowledged that there was always a risk of “some wholly unexpected emergence of a new and dangerous infectious disease, but nothing of the sort has marked the last fifty years.” Epidemics, it seemed, were of interest only to historians.

David S. Jones, History in a Crisis—Lessons for Covid-19, New Eng. J. Med. (April 30, 2020) (quoting Macfarlane Burnet & David O. White, Natural History of Infectious Disease, 4th ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972)

Email messes with priorities

I think email has been a disaster for all of us. The idea of letting the inbox determine your order of priority is utterly ridiculous,but it's very, very hard to resist.

Michèle Lamont (sociologist), quoted in Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 37

Regimented routines don't come easily

For most people, however, daily scheduled writing is neither an intuitive habit to adopt nor an easy one to sustain. As any drill sergeant or Mother Superior can attest, few humans possess the intrinsic self-discipline required to adhere to a strictly regimented routine day after day and week after week, no matter how beneficial its effects.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 18