Home > Author > Ani Baker,
1 " He taught me the mark of a Grand Gesture - that it wouldn't be missed if it weren't done. A Grand Gesture lives in the mind of the giver and is never even a consideration in the mind of the gifted. "
― Ani Baker, , Handsome Vanilla
2 " Nothing is free now that we're all adults. "
3 " ...without thinking the follow-up thought that prevents a person from following through with the original, she throws the tea in the mug at the screen and watches it drip down, while now, finally, allowing the follow-up thought to come through, the thought that would have stopped her from throwing the tea at the screen in the first place. She feels two things: recognizable regret and dim, unfamiliar power. "
4 " There may very well have been a tennis player named Dennis whose only reason for playing tennis was for the thrill of the rhyme. There may have even been two Tennis Dennises. In fact, with billions and billions of people, 200,000 years, give or take the years before tennis was a sport, there may have even been three.You might find that thinking this way expands your freedom, your consideration of your own capability, the spectrum of what all people can be, and can do. "
5 " A good thing to do is to think about what people have done. Not only people that you've read about in books or seen on the news or heard mentioned in deliberate conversation, and not only deeds that are noteworthy. It's good to think about all the possibilities of what people have probably done. The scope of what's possible, statistical probabilities of unique behavior and unusual action in the 200,000 years that people have existed because there are more than 7 billion of us alive right now and that's not including the number of people who have ever lived. Within those numbers exist captivating, eccentric, strange, fanciful variation, when you consider what people have probably done. Like, every time you've had an impulse that you've held back, imagine that there has been a person who has had that same impulse and gone through with it, because there probably has been. Imagine any type of person and any type of story having happened because when you do that, it feels like you're creating, but you're probably not. Imagine, considering the magnitude of these numbers and the variables within each human being, that all possibilities have occurred. If physical anomalies like twins born with bodies totally fused together resembling two-headed, eight limbed, human spiders, or a man born with a shrunken female head affixed to the back of his own head, which was animated without being consciously controlled by him, then imagine that anything you can imagine has occurred. However typical or atypical, these things you're imagining have happened. These people you're thinking of have been. "
6 " This is the first fight that I've been around for and I know instantly that the terrible adrenaline flung into the crowd with the force of two flailing fighters will never be my drug. "
7 " My stomach is in instant pain and I feel that terrible adrenaline again. I hate the crowd even more than the fighters and I see myself learning that proximity to pain is a particular pain of its own. "
8 " This cellulite on her stomach is the first time that I ponder the relationship between popularity and imperfection and it is the very first time that I realized that they coexist. "
9 " The locker room is so quiet around them. Older girl walks away and Amber has to slowly continue changing her clothes and try not to shake from a more potent blend of confusion and embarrassment than I had yet experienced or imagined or knew to fear. "
10 " She asks me if I'm new. I feel how badly the question "Are you new?" stings when you're not new. "
