Quote of the Day (Joe Moran, on Shy Writers)

“Shyness is often seen as just a shrinking away from the crowd, a retreat from social life. But it also involves redirecting our social instincts into other areas, like writing. We write partly because we feel that other kinds of dialogue have failed, and that we need to speak at one remove if we are to speak at all. Writing draws, just as shyness does, on what the French call l’esprit de l’escalier: that conversation we carry on in our heads after the other person has gone.”—Joe Moran, “Do Shy People Make the Best Writers?”, The Daily Beast, March 11, 2017