“I am looking at a black and white photograph of Muriel Cooper at work captioned ‘Muriel Cooper in conversation with unidentified males, c.1972.’”

“Dear reader, the contents of this magazine are generated through hitchhiking.”

“He rode the length of every train line with his eyes closed, feeling the curve of each track and then drawing the path he perceived in his sketchbook.”

“Vladia Brooks kneads bread in the same spot that her father, Vladimir Nevl, kneaded bread for almost 50 years.”

“My grandmother, who is a potter, always insisted that she makes ceramic vessels, not art.”

“‘You’re so cute, I just want to eat you up!’ A grownup told me this when I was a kid and I ran away crying.”

“A man in a fancy black car is holding down his horn at a flock of pigeons that are blocking his way.”

“When all the other mothers wore heels, stockings and hair spray, Esther would come to events with no stockings, no hairspray and no heels.”

“The litter box may have brought us physically closer to our feline companions, but that doesn’t mean we understand them any better than when they lived mostly outdoors.”

“It’s illustrated in a topographic style, with the region seen from above and stretching out to the horizon. The artist even included the sky. . . that’s nice.”

“I have become a hoarder of dreams. Since high school, they’ve slowly piled up. They’re strewn across journals and loose slips of paper, and in the last few years stored on the Cloud, a nice place for dreams.”

“I ventured out into the sick world to take leave of the city and spend a week with my old friend Annie at her cabin on the North Fork of Long Island.”