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21 " Hey you,” I say. “You okay? Everything in one piece in there?” He smiles tightly. “I have a good life. I’m in therapy, probably always will be. Which I think is a good thing. It’s like I said earlier. You make your head a hospitable place to be, you might never want to leave it. But if you’re trapped in there, you’re doomed. I decided a long time ago that surviving probably meant achieving something in the middle. Something I could live with, that made me content. So, you know.” His body relaxes. He is done. Turns to me with a slight smile. “Ongoing. "
― Kayla Rae Whitaker , The Animators
22 " You're gonna needle this down to dust in your head. I am telling you, it's not worth it. Not every guy is worth an atomic explosion. Zoom out. "
23 " I am our finisher. "
24 " It smells like people who have left. "
25 " Anything that makes you in that way, anything that makes you hurt and hungry in that way, is worth investigating. No matter how disgusting the source. "
26 " (T)he tones: bombastic, intense. The fruit of the hours Mel spent nerding out over her color key game, a massive shade chart occupying the screen of her desktop Mac, aiming for that grainy, ghostly seventies neon, the look of K-tel record sleeves and Colecovision graphics. After all, isn’t that the future we envision for ourselves: all brighter colors and dramatic graphics, everything at its ultimate zenith? "
27 " His face is so earnest, so hopeful. This is a person who hasn’t lost much yet. "
28 " Our Kotex commercial airs the same week the article is released. We were hired to design something “pad-centric” when "Nashville Combat" was in postproduction and we were subsisting on lentils and six-packs of PBR. We were instructed to steal some thunder from tampon usage with a “fun, light-hearted spot” showcasing the company’s new Super Light Close-to-You sanitary napkin. “Isn’t that a Carpenters song?” Mel said after they approached us. "
29 " Toddling with pants down into our uncertain future. "
30 " I'm the most alone person I know. "
31 " The air feels like pudding. "
32 " We ran our endurance dry with our life stories, trying to reproduce them, make them manageable enough to coexist with. We made them smaller, disfiguring them with our surgeries. "
33 " Yet another thing that refused to exist, because I didn't know the words to prove that it did. "
34 " I feel myself light up, like I do every time I hear an outside assessment of how I seem. Weirdly gratified. "
35 " The stroke slowed me down. For the sake of my own survival, I was forced to take in the outside world exactly as it was, without expectation or distortion, in order to exist in it without breaking myself in half. "
36 " You make your head a hospitable enough place to be, why would you ever want to leave? "