Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.– Ben Okri
Category Archives: quotes
Don’t Ask
Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.
– Giorgos Seferis
writer, diplomat, Nobel laureate
1900-1971
Futility
“I don’t know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone. “Alan LightmanThe Accidental Universe (2014)
We have met the enemy…
No greater mistake can be made than to think that our institutions are fixed or may not be changed for the worse. … Increasing prosperity tends to breed indifference and to corrupt moral soundness. Glaring inequalities in condition create discontent and strain the democratic relation. The vicious are the willing, and the ignorant are unconscious instruments of political artifice. Selfishness and demagoguery take advantage of liberty. The selfish hand constantly seeks to control government, and every increase of governmental power, even to meet just needs, furnishes opportunity for abuse and stimulates the effort to bend it to improper uses. … The peril of this nation is not in any foreign foe! We, the people, are its power, its peril, and its hope!
– Charles Evans Hughes
QOTD
In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.
-John Leonard
Writing Time
My writing time needs to surround itself with empty stretches, or at least unpeopled ones, for the writing takes place in an area of suspension as in a hanging nest that is almost entirely encapsulated.
– Maxine Kumin
Click image for full size original
I must not fear.
I must not fear. Fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
My thought for the day, from Dune by Frank Herbert.
OK, let’s get back to work. 🙂
Fetch
“Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.”
– A.A. Milne
January 18, 1882 — January 31, 1956
Your World
However your world is viewed, it must be your own … Only through a vigorous exactitude of presentation can the essential strangeness of life be conveyed … You’ll never be able to write a novel as long as you have the illusion that … the world you know is too dull and commonplace.
– John Braine
Writing a Novel (1974)
avast!
Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.
– Pablo Picasso
Suit Up
“Keep on writing, no matter what! That’s the most important thing. As long as you have a job on hand that absorbs all your mental energy, you haven’t much worry to spare over other things. It serves as a suit of armor.”
– Eugene O’Neill
Damn Good Advice
Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
– Mark Twain
Metaphor 