Quotes by Authors - Page 29

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.
Constance Hale
You take what you can get, I reckon. You take what you can get.
Chris Howard
You couldn't make up something that looked so right.
Chris Howard
Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.
Oscar Wilde
I felt naked beneath the wildness of her eyes. I felt alive. Unknown. And I knew then that the world contained so many things I would never understand.
Chris Howard
why be bothered with other people's set-ups? it only leads to torture.
Bob Dylan
And I howled at that swarm and the crops and the sky, and the stars should have quit because there weren't no reason to be shining.
Chris Howard
Because even when there is no hope, somehow you can still find a place to pin inside the things that you need.
Chris Howard
Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s—all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics—in practice—even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas—they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other’s grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don’t Ask, 'giving prizes to friends.
Sesshu Foster
A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.
Rachel Kushner
Once he got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to see a spectacular death-agony; but he just went off into the bush and probably ate something, for he came back in a few days quite cock-a-hoop and as ready to eat snakes as ever.
Richard Hughes
You never turn away family, no matter how f***ed up they are.
Ronald Velesovsky
There were these things and the flames ate these things, and since fire doesn't distinguish between the word of God and the word of the Soviet Communications Registry Bureau, both Qur'an and telephone directory returned to His mouth in the same inhalation of smoke.
Anthony Marra
Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one. Not old.Not young.But a viable die-able age.
Arundhati Roy
The joyous clamor in my mind drowned out the strange sound outside the car: a humming noise that was gathering speed and growing louder, a roar that was not the waves curling up the beach.
Padma Venkatraman
What did Saturday's used to taste like? Like eggs and fried ham and the bitter smell of hair in heavy rollers. Like long quiet hours and making up after a fight. Like ointment and bruising. Like waiting, especially, for something - anything - to happen.
Lauren Oliver
As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Ohcorpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by theheels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania forbattle and for love, when seen from the place where your staringeyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It’s thatI think of, oh corpse, it’s that you make me think of: but does anythingchange? Nothing. No other days exist but these of oursbefore the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. Mayit be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of whatI am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause:to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope youspent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in thebox. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.
Italo Calvino
Victor was the first to speak, and when he did, it was with an eloquence and composure perfectly befitting the situation
V.E. Schwab
Mirabelle sat down, dropping into the cushions like a ball being caught in a large leather glove.
Sara Sheridan
Flora took pleasure in the delicacy of her approach and studied the ways of the smallest, sweetest blooms she could find, tiny pimpernels and forget-me-nots hiding in the pockets of the fields. The energy of the sun on her body and the joy of foraging filled her soul. She flew the fields and gathered until the light began to fade and she heard the sound of her forager sisters' wings turning for home. Then she joined them.
Laline Paull
It ain't so easy writing about nothin
Patti Smith
Gennia is eating and talking to Ruiz on the phone. Each time he takes a mouthful, he catches a whiff of his shirt, which stinks of failure and yesterday.
Michael Robotham
She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.
Toni Morrison
There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective “precise,” for example, needs unpicking. If a “minimalist” writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They’re just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it.
China Miéville
Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child's swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.
Peter Heller
You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.
China Miéville
He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain air stung his lips. She was driving too fast on this road that had once been a forest. Early humans had lived in it. They studied fire and the movement of the sun. They read the clouds and the moon and tried to understand the human mind His father had tried to melt him into a Polish forest when he was five years old. He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same
Deborah Levy
By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider’s web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving—to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in passing—light, laughing hands that knew no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of glass licked smooth by the sea waves.
Vladimir Nabokov
Oyin Da’s mind is as elegant as a French horn, thoughts moving in whorls and evoking fresh mint leaves.
Tade Thompson
Iverson glanced down at my white-knuckled grip, then at my eyes. A hint of a smile more subtle than a single flick of snow crossed his face, and his eyes nodded approval.
Allen Eskins
Feel no regret for roses, autumn too has its delights...How could she say that? Didn't she see that for us there could never be autumn, that we could never sit, as anyone else could sit, beside the fire all day on Sundays in November; that September's leaves, that fall for man and beast alike, were not our leaves to walk in; that October storms would never find us sharing an umbrella? The love of spring had thrived on wine and candles; now in the August of our lives, we needed newspapers and comfortable chairs. But it was impossible. No autumn--only a cold wind that blew through our summer, freezing the leaves in their places before they could motley and fall.
Raphael Carter
Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African American and part native Hawaiian. His hair, straight and glossy black, and the almond shape of his eyes came from his Japanese grandmother. But their color was the cool blue he'd inherited from his mum, a Swedish windsurfing champion.
Geraldine Brooks
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
John Updike
The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.
William Faulkner
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.
William Gibson
Juliet!' I whip around but not quickly enough. She's swallowed by the crowd, the gap that allowed her to break for the door closing just as quickly as it opened, a shifting Tetris pattern of bodies...
Lauren Oliver
He turns and walks away, moving so quickly that the candle flames shiver with the motion of the air. “I miss you,” Isobel says as he leaves, but the sentiment is crushed by the clatter of the beaded curtain falling closed behind him.
Erin Morgenstern
A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.
Mark Twain
But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant
Jeffrey Eugenides
DADDYYou do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty years, poor and white,Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.Daddy, I have had to kill you.You died before I had time―Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,Ghastly statue with one grey toeBig as a Frisco sealAnd a head in the freakish AtlanticWhen it pours bean green over blueIn the waters of beautiful Nauset.I used to pray to recover you.Ach, du.In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars.But the name of the town is common.My Polack friendSays there are a dozen or two.So I never could tell where youPut your foot, your root,I never could talk to you.The tongue stuck in my jaw.It stuck in a barb wire snare.Ich, ich, ich, ich,I could hardly speak.I thought every German was you.And the language obsceneAn engine, an engineChuffing me off like a Jew.A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.I began to talk like a Jew.I think I may well be a Jew.The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of ViennaAre not very pure or true.With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luckAnd my Taroc pack and my Taroc packI may be a bit of a Jew.I have always been scared of you,With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.And your neat mustacheAnd your Aryan eye, bright blue.Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You―Not God but a swastikaSo black no sky could squeak through.Every woman adores a Fascist,The boot in the face, the bruteBrute heart of a brute like you.You stand at the blackboard, daddy,In the picture I have of you,A cleft in your chin instead of your footBut no less a devil for that, no notAnd less the black man whoBit my pretty red heart in two.I was ten when they buried you.At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do.But they pulled me out of the sack,And they stuck me together with glue.And then I knew what to do.I made a model of you,A man in black with a Meinkampf lookAnd a love of the rack and the screw.And I said I do, I do.So daddy, I’m finally through.The black telephone’s off at the root,The voices just can’t worm through.If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two―The vampire who said he was youAnd drank my blood for a year,Seven years, if you want to know.Daddy, you can lie back now.There’s a stake in your fat black heartAnd the villagers never like you.They are dancing and stamping on you.They always knew it was you.Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Sylvia Plath
I love you, I’ve loved you for years and I’ll love you for years more. It’s not something I can fight, it’s not something I want to fight.
Somi Ekhasomhi
We’re all broken. We all have cracks. It’s not about making it through life in one piece it’s about narrowing the gap between the fissures so we don’t shatter.”Ted Basel to Jo Nehr in my next "Surrender" story
Riley Murphy
Every person has a season for knowledge.
Elana Johnson
A surrendered day is a good day.
Danielle Boonstra
...there was a certain comfort in surrender.
Adam Langer
It is generally the trustful and optimistic people who can afford to retreat. The loveless and faithless ones are compelled by their pessimism to attack.
T.H. White
Fear of death is fear of surrender to Infinity. Learn to surrender, to exist at Infinity while alive, and fear of death dissolves. Fear of death is fear of the Unknown. Realize the Wonder, the Eternal Unknowability of the Totality of Existence, and fear of death is transcended. If happiness or freedom depends on the Answer to the Question, then there can be no happiness or freedom. The Question cannot be satisfactorily or finally Answered. For one who abides at Infinity, happy and free, at ease with his Ultimate Ignorance, the Question and the Answer are equally unnecessary. What began will come to an end. What is Wonderful is not threatened. The Process of the Totality of Existence is Transcendental and Eternal. Only a fraction of the Whole can pass away in any moment, since only a fraction of the Whole appears in any moment. Therefore, the Heart Itself is always already Full of Wonder and Love. "I" is the body-mind, the fraction of the Whole that is now appearing and will soon disappear. "I" must be surrendered to the Heart, to the Whole, which is Infinity, Wonder, and Love.
Adi Da Samraj
We think it’s weak to surrender, but sometimes it’s the bravest thing we can possibly do.
Toni Sorenson
When you surrender, you live in eager anticipation of the surprise. The dual weights of yearning and despair are cast off.
Annette Vaillancourt
Surrender doesn’t have to be a heavy, solemn thing. It can be a joyous relief. Finally the burden is off you.
Annette Vaillancourt
Once you truly surrender, you won’t feel like you are waiting anymore. You won’t know how quickly or where your SoulMate will show up. Prepare to be surprised!
Annette Vaillancourt
Surrender activates the Law of Attraction
Annette Vaillancourt
You want something real bad? Go after it with ferocity like if your life depended on it and never ever surrender. Only a question of time.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
Why not simply surrender to one’s doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?
Paul Russell
God is committed when we are submitted! Surrender whatever you're holding onto!
Evinda Lepins
I couldn’t fight the tide, so Idecided to float along.
David Levithan
Let go of everything. That is how you get everything.
Bryant McGill
It's easier to surrender to confinement.
Jhumpa Lahiri