Quotes by Writers - Page 98

Grace is never wanting. God always gives sufficient grace to whoever is willing to receive it.
Francis de Sales
To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
Frederick Buechner
We must be willing to get rid ofthe life we’ve planned, so as to havethe life that is waiting for us.The old skin has to be shedbefore the new one can come.If we fix on the old, we get stuck.When we hang onto any form,we are in danger of putrefaction.Hell is life drying up.
Joseph Campbell
But grace and effort are not opposites. Grace and earning are opposites.
Mark Buchanan
We “talk” relationship but we “live” religion, with unsatisfying results. Christianity defines itself, first and foremost, as a relationship with God. Even though this is true, our human nature tends toward living a relationship with God as if it were a religion
Mark Cowper-Smith
The Fates and Furies, as well as the Graces and Sirens, glide with linked hands over life.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw benieath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg.
Herman Melville
Adventures are to the adventurous. They abound on every side; but only the chosen few have the courage to embrace them. And they will not come to you; you must go out to seek them. Then they meet you half-way, and rush into your arms, for they know their true lovers.
Allen Grant
It was in a swampy village on the lagoon river behind the Turner Peninsula that Pollock's first encounter with the Porroh man occurred. The women of that country are famous for their good looks - they are Gallinas with a dash of European blood that dates from the days of Vasco da Gama and the English slave-traders, and the Porroh man, too, was possibly inspired by a faint Caucasian taint in his composition. (It's a curious thing to think that some of us may have distant cousins eating men on Sherboro Island or raiding with the Sofas.) At any rate, the Porroh man stabbed the woman to the heart as though he had been a mere low-class Italian, and very narrowly missed Pollock. But Pollock, using his revolver to parry the lightning stab which was aimed at his deltoid muscle, sent the iron dagger flying, and, firing, hit the man in the hand.He fired again and missed, knocking a sudden window out of the wall of the hut. The Porroh man stooped in the doorway, glancing under his arm at Pollock. Pollock caught a glimpse of his inverted face in the sunlight, and then the Englishman was alone, sick and trembling with the excitement of the affair, in the twilight of the place. It had all happened in less time than it takes to read about it.("Pollock And The Porroh Man")
H.G.Wells
What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, even to risk a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Against his interest, against his happiness he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him and go he must.
H.G.Wells
I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.
Herman Melville
My therapist and I even have a joke about it: shit is truly fucked up when I start threatening to take a road trip.
Chris Gethard
Life is two things. Life is morality – life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and morality looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves you. If morality means anything it means keeping bounds, respecting implications, respecting implicit bounds. If individuality means anything it means breaking bounds – adventure.
H.G.Wells
I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
Herman Melville
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
Herman Melville
The words of the bards come down the centuries to us, warm with living breath.
Pádraic Pearse
I don't think writers need to be insane. Just crazy.
Rayne Hall
I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Writers of literature, if they are real writers, know that their readers are confused about reality and the emotions derived from that reality and are looking for clarity concerning the life that they are engulfed in.
Noah Cicero
The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.
Aleksandar Hemon
I'm not interested in the reviews by critics over the age of 15.
Mark A. Cooper
Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business—you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. ‘Millicent at last understands.’ Nobody ever understands.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Sentences spoken by writers, unless they have been written out first, rarely say what writers wish to say. Writers are unlucky speakers, by and large, which accounts for their being in a profession which encourages them to stay at their desk for years, if necessary, pondering what to say next and how best to say it. Interviewers propose to speed up this process by trepanning writers, so to speak, and fishing around in their brains for unused ideas which otherwise might never get out of there. Not a single idea has ever been discovered by means of this brutal method-- and still the trepanning of authors goes on every day.I now refuse all those who wish to take the top off my skull yet again. The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
If you are an artist, may no love of wealth or fame or admiration and no fear of blame or misunderstanding make you ever paint, with pen or brush, an ideal of external life otherwise than as you see it.
Olive Schreiner
Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.
Lorraine Hansberry
The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas.
Oliver Markus
Sergeant Boyle was an Earthling. He was the only Earthling on the expedition. In fact, he was the only creature from the Milky Way. The other members were from all over the place. The expedition was a joint effort supported by about two hundred galaxies. Boyle wasn't a technician. He was an English teacher. The thing was that Earth was the only place in the whole known Universe where language was used. It was a unique Earthling invention. Everybody else used mental telepathy, so Earthlings could get pretty good jobs as language teachers just about anywhere they went. The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time -- to start thinking in terms of projects.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably" and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.
William Zinsser
Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.
William Zinsser
...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.
William Zinsser
Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit - a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled. The adjective exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.
William Zinsser
Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.
William Zinsser
I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the day's work--and not with some enjoyment.
William Zinsser
The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.
William Zinsser
The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everyone else, you have to want to write better than everyone else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen--editors, agents, and publishers--whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best.
William Zinsser
People wonder when you're allowed to call yourself a writer. I think maybe the answer is when you recognize that is work." - Nina MacLaughlin, 'With Compliments
Manjula Martin
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author. It's a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.
William Zinsser
Anyone who writes can be called a writer because they write.
Dejan Stojanovic
Those who would like to become writers attend courses on writing poetry and prose and analyze their own work and that of other writers in development. Teachers teach them that talent is not required and that anyone, who wants to be a writer, can do it if they only master the technique of writing and master the formulas of the genre that they choose. With a little brain storming ideas written on cards, as well as designs and plans on the table, one can even write a novel in a month. There is no secret; the whole secret is in the technique, a little research, and the rest is solved by form, according to a formula, in which it is all nicely wrapped up and packaged. And so, a bestseller is born.
Dejan Stojanovic
What are all these writers fighting for? For their own victory or for the victory of their profession?
Dejan Stojanovic
Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.
Fannie Hurst
There are literary works that speak for themselves and there are writers who boast through work.
Dejan Stojanovic
Names do not write poems nor do they create work.
Dejan Stojanovic
A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Many writers were better before they became famous.
Dejan Stojanovic
No matter what level of success, there is no such thing as a secure writer
Michael Lennick
Writers often have the cleanest windows, floors, fridges and toilets, the most up-to-date filing system or the best record for returning calls or e-mails because, in the moment, just about any task seems more palatable than sitting down to write.” (p.136)
Mark David Gerson
NEWSPAPER: What great paper is the Earth; what a typeface is the Day; what ink is the Night! – Everyone prints, everyone reads; no one understands.
Xavier Forneret
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author.
Samuel Johnson
Writers are also sort of like vultures, but with fewer ethics.
Libba Bray
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
Alberto Manguel
The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man.
Hilaire Belloc
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Aldous Huxley
Be patient, you are in good company. Our Lord Himself, our Lady, the apostles, and countless saints, both men and women, have been poor.
Francis de Sales
If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort.
Mark Fisher
Our possessions are not ours- God has given them to us to cultivate, that we may make them fruitful and profitable in His Service, and so doing we shall please Him.
Francis de Sales
The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret: every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.
Eduardo Galeano
Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor
Herman Melville
Poverty is not a circumstance, it's an attitude.
Rita Gonzalez