Susan Orlean

“A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.”

“'Brave' is one of those words that has been bleached of most of its meaning these days, thanks to far too many appearances in the glaring light of ad slogans and corporate public relations....”

“Sometimes I'm dazzled by how modern and fabulous we are, and how easy everything can be for us; that's the gilded glow of technology, and I marvel at it all the time.”

“I don't turn to greeting cards for wisdom and advice, but they are a fine reflection of the general drift of the culture.”

“Places like Hilton Head, with water adjacency and nice climates, are in high demand, and land values are insane. In the case of Hilton Head, which was developed in 1970 on what had been a mo...”

“Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it's all gone sideways.”

“One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day.”

“The semiology and phenomenology of hashtaggery intrigues me. From what I understand, it all began very simply: on Twitter, hashtags - those little checkerboard marks that look like this # -...”

“In an interesting inversion of status, the reigning breed in the dog park these days is the really-oddball-unidentifiable-mixed-breed-mutt-found-wandering-the-street or its equivalent. The s...”

“When I was a kid, Halloween was strictly a starchy-vegetable-only holiday, with pumpkins and Indian corn on the front stoop; there was nothing electric, nothing inflatable, nothing with late...”

“When I was a kid, phone calls were a premium commodity; only the very coolest kids had a phone line of their own, and long-distance phone calls were made after eleven, when the rates went do...”

“I had never considered using a hashtag anywhere other than on Twitter, but now I'm inspired. Text messages have always seemed a little flat to me, so the murmuring Greek chorus of a hashtag...”

“Why, I wonder, should the popularity of a news story matter to me? Does it mean it's a good story or just a seductive one?”

“Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual pr...”

“Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things - the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilarating experience of open space.”

“On the very same day that I ordered an iPad 2, I went shopping to buy myself a letter opener. I like to cover all my bases.”

“Unlimited choice is paralyzing. The Internet has made this form of paralysis due to option overload a standard feature of comfortable modern life.”

“Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.”

“In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.”

“I'm very excited about my new Spotify account, which gives me access to twenty gazillion songs any time, all the time. The day I opened my account, though, I sat there perplexed. How would I...”