...Quotables @ Bookshelf ...

seribulan

Middlemarch

Author: George Eliot

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.”

LelaRentaka7

“A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

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“There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

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“How to Write a Poem

Catch the air
around the butterfly.”
― Katerina Stoykova Klemer, The air around the butterfly/Въздухът около пеперудата

LelaRentaka7

“Writing is like going underwater - thank you for being there when I come back up.”
― Ali Shaw, The Girl With Glass Feet

LelaRentaka7

“Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.”
― Dorianne Laux, The Poet's Companion: A Guide To The Pleasures Of Writing Poetry

LelaRentaka7

“The true poem rests between the words.”
― Vanna Bonta, Shades Of The World

LelaRentaka7

“I just want my stories to be mine.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, Dora: A Headcase

LelaRentaka7

“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

LelaRentaka7

“The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is:
"Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out."

And if you have no such friend,--and you want to write,--well, then you must imagine one. ”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

LelaRentaka7

“Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary”
― Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir

LelaRentaka7

“Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

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“Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

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“We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

LelaRentaka7

“Writer's block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something. Why? If you have something to say, then say it. If not, enjoy the silence while it lasts. The noise will return soon enough.”
― Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

LelaRentaka7

“I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

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I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

LelaRentaka7

“…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

LelaRentaka7

“Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant)”
― Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry and Other Stories

LelaRentaka7

“The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me