If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.
– Dorothy Parker
Category Archives: quotes
Monsters
I’ve had this quote sitting in the sticky notes app on my desktop for a couple of weeks. It’s time for it to go, so maybe you can make some use of it.
We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.
– Robert Hayden
What monster of abstraction most polices and threatens you? For me, probably anything that begins with “the war on …” or includes the word, “warfare.”
Learning to Write
Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing. The first step is to become a slow reader.
– Joseph Epstein
Metaphor 