Cecily: You are wonderfully intelligent and kind and generous and wicked.
Arnaud: Thank you. That warms my cold heart.
Cecily: Your heart is not cold. You are simply delusional.
conversations
Cecily, on work culture.
Cecily: In Paris, there is no such concept as “watercooler conversation”. It’s called a communal cigarette break. And it can happen up to thirty times a day. Note to self: spend salary on cigarettes, ergo, increase end of year bonus. Je fume, donc je suis.
Maurice, on mental health.
Maurice: In 2003, they put me in a mental hospital and diagnosed me with bipolar. But I wouldn’t take their fucking meds. I’m proud to be bipolar!
Cecily, on relative poverty.
Cecily: When I was poor in Paris, I couldn’t afford a Vogue magazine to feed me like Carrie Bradshaw. Instead, I took Übers.
Christopher, on Oxford.
Christopher: I do not know the word to which you refer, however, I did go to Oxford.
Alexander, the Pacific Northwestern absurdist.
Alexander: Once I came to accept the meaningless nature of existence, it was much easier to take pleasure in simple things. Now I’m content to see everything as my inside joke and watch the world burn from the comfort of the Pacific Northwestern Void that is Portland.
Alexander, on a schnauzer.
Alexander: One more love disappointment and I’m buying a miniature schnauzer, naming it Machiavelli, and calling it a day on dating.
Cecily, on leaving.
Cecily: When I left Sydney, I was escaping an imagined hardship.
Cecily, on writing.
Cecily: I want to write postcards, not extended literature!
Two friends, on gardens.
Cecily: Kipling once wrote, “Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful’, and sitting in the shade”.
Ishmael: I like that. How can I use it?
Cecily: Well, for me it means something about embracing motivated change in all forms. Making active decisions. Never getting complacent. We grow our gardens — alone or with others — and some seasons are made for poppies and others for Japanese maples and others for stones or sand to be tilled gently.
Ishmael: That’s beautiful.
Cecily: It’s beautiful or it’s trite. But sometimes there is beauty in the trite.
thedailymails 