Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Submitted on Sat, 2010-02-27 00:59 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2491 from Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baffled by this same problem; that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand--"non-being." Every day includes much more non-being than being. Yesterday for example, Tuesday the 18th of April, was [as] it happened a good day; above the average in "being." It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages; my head was relieved of the pressure of writing about Roger; I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shared as I like--there were the willows, I remember, all plummy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book--the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette--which interested me. These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously. Read more »
Submitted on Sat, 2010-02-27 00:46 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2490 from A Sketch of the Past by Virginia Woolf
Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, "Do you know what a poem is, Esther?"
"No, what?" I would say,
"A piece of dust."
Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, "So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.
And of course, Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep.
Submitted on Sat, 2010-02-20 04:10 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2469 from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
She reminded me of a warning I was fond of repeating: do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we reach for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.
Submitted on Thu, 2010-01-21 00:00 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2463 from Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Saturday: May 3rd [1958]... Tomorrow I must correct all my exams which I should do in one day- they're short and all on the same subject. Then a close outline of The Wasteland which should take all week. I pick up my ms. of poetry & leaf through it, unable to invent, to create- all my projected nostalgia for my students can't shake the conviction that teaching is a smiling public-service vampire that drinks blood and brain without a thank you.
Submitted on Wed, 2010-01-20 22:05 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2456 from Unabridged Journals by Sylvia Plath
…A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face as fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another Rum St James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil-sharpener with the shavings curling into a saucer under my drink.
I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
Submitted on Sat, 2009-12-26 17:43 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2426 from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars— mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination— stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern— of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Submitted on Thu, 2009-12-24 23:26 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2402 from Feynman Lectures on Physics (footnote) by Richard Feynman
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
Submitted on Tue, 2009-08-04 09:42 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2320 from Teddy by J.D. Salinger
Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers' food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.
Submitted on Tue, 2009-08-04 07:35 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2314 from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
"Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion."
Submitted on Sun, 2009-08-02 18:34 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2314 from Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger
