Writing Quotes - Page 62

It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.The woods are acres of sticks: I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open.

When your heart is open, your eyes see the beauty that is all around you.

We are artists. When we can’t find the beauty, we create it.

Breathe in the beauty all around you.

Time unfolds beauty, wonder, and mystery to reveal the auspicious tapestry of life.

With grace and beauty, feel.

Find beauty in the madness.

Don’t beat yourself up, son. I’m sure there is a culture on this spinning ball of dirt where you can be pretty. If not, do rock ‘n roll, or practice words. That shit’s pretty as well.

R.X. Bird

I wrote because of their inability to nurture me. I wrote to conceal the truth that life was filled with pain and that true beauty could only come from that pain. I wrote to simply disguise that pain.

All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times...Milton does it so well in the Fourth Book of Paradise Lost that I defy any man of a sane understanding to read the whole of that book before going to bed and not to wake up next morning as though he had been on a journey.

Talented writers etched the story detailing the travails of broken souls numerous times. The poets recounted an equal amount of times the lucent tears of human laughter and weeping sorrow. Everyone understands bitterness and joy. Conversely, the most evocative aspects of human beings, the bewildering clarification of their ambiguous natures, are virtually indefinable and therefore unutterable. Written testaments to love, truth, beauty, and adoration of nature are inherently weak because words fail to convey what a person experiences inside the spaces that compose their chemical field.

Kilroy J. Oldster

What is the beauty of a thing if others do not take pleasure in it.

Beauty surrounds us, but oftentimes it takes a person with a poetic perception, an artist’s way of looking at the world, to first notice the sublime, and then stagecraft the splendor of nature so that other people can perceive their synoptic vision. The spirit and aesthetic intention behind the work is what assigns the work its artistic quality. Great works of poetry and writing, for instance, express not simply a criticism of life, but also encompass a philosophy for living.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Witnessing the panoply of beauty in all of nature takes us out of our shell of self-absorption and makes us realize that we are merely bit players in the game of life. Witnessing the majesty of beauty confirms that the real show lies outside us to observe and appreciate and not inside us to transfix us. True beauty charms us into seeing the grandeur of goodness that surrounds us and by doing so, the pristine splendor of nature releases us from wallowing in the poverty of our self-idealization. The bewitching spell cast by the exquisiteness of nature levitates our souls and transforms our psyche. When we see, hear, taste, smell, or touch what is beautiful, we cannot suppress the urge to replicate its baffling texture by singing, dancing, painting, or writing. Opening our eye to the loveliness of a single flower is how we stay in touch with the glorious pageantry of living.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Stories change the world.

Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.

Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words have the ability to change our lives simply by being next to each other.

Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

I write our names on the page.What of it, if the paper will be burned?I write our names in the sand.What of it, if the shore will be washed by waves?I write our names on trees that will be cutand benches that will be painted,but what of it?I will keep on writing our namesbecause in this world of ephemera, You and I are the only constant.

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

Ursula K Le Guin

This poem was meant to be unwritten. But I am writing it now and have thereby changed destiny.

There is a love for structure in them that I recognize, and a desire to worship correctness that I know and I share. When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it. But I feel that same ache for the past in myself: to uphold the columns of literature, grammar, the Western tradition. The English language began as an upheaval; I am not protecting it when I try to guard it against change. The Jesus Christ of it, Chaucer, walked across the water telling dirty jokes, made twenty stories stretch to feed a million people, spelled the word "cunt" five ways, performed miracles. Any innovation I put down on paper is an attempt to remind myself of this. I am not modern. I was not born to blaze new paths or bring down walls. I break form against my nature to tell myself that revolution, too, is a tradition that must be upheld.

Patricia Lockwood

Intuition is truth.

When a writer's heart is filled with the music of her soul, her words sing.

Try being an indie author, a minority author, a woman, and a person with health issues in the world of traditional - that's where you are clearly 'different' and marginalized. I am all of that, yet I am still here and smiling. Life is good!

Leslie Marmon Silko whispers the story is long. No, longer. Longer than that even. Longer than anything. With Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath drink at the bar. Laugh the dark laughter in the dark light. Sing a dark drunken song of men. Make a slurry toast. Rock back and forth, and drink the dark, and bask in the wallow of women knowing what women know. Just for a night. When you need to feel the ground of your life and the heart of the world, there will be a bonfire at the edge of a canyon under a night sky where Joy Harjo will sing your bonesong. Go ahead-with Anne Carson - rebuild the wreckage of a life a word at a time, ignoring grammar and the forms that keep culture humming. Make word war and have it out and settle it, scattering old meanings like hacked to pieces paper doll confetti. The lines that are left … they are awake and growling. With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words. Stretching out horizonless. I am in a midnight blue room. A writing room. With a blood red desk. A room with rituals and sanctuaries. I made it for myself. It took me years. I reach down below my desk and pull up a bottle of scotch. Balvenie. 30 year. I pour myself an amber shot. I drink. Warm lips, throat. I close my eyes. I am not Virginia Woolf. But there is a line of hers that keeps me well: Arrange whatever pieces come your way. I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

Lidia Yuknavitch

Receptionist: How do you write women so well?Melvin Udall: I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.

Melvin Udall played by Jack Nicholson in AS GOOD AS IT GETS.

This thing that I created, this thing I made as a woman, for other women, is worth something. It's worth exactly the same as what a similar thing, built by a man, for men, is worth.

Jennifer Weiner

It has been said that Shakespeare, the great delineator of human character, has failed in distinguishing his principal women—and that such as he meant to be amiable are all equally gentle and good. How difficult then it is for a novelist to give to one of his heroines any very marked feature which shall not disfigure her! Too much reason and self-command destroy the interest we take in her distresses. It has been observed, that Clarissa is so equal to every trial as to diminish our pity. Other virtues than gentleness, pity, filial obedience, or faithful attachment, hardly belong to the sex.

Charlotte Turner Smith

The dilemma for women who love to write may not have so much to do with finding the elusive literary voice, as with being reluctant to use the one that's already lurking inside, just waiting for the chance to speak up. Many of us, especiall,y those from the generations taught to be good, accommodating girls, are afraid of sounding too strong, too loud, too unconventional, or simply too much like the self we're afraid to reveal to the world. Most of us have at least an inkling of what form our writing voice should take, if only we might find the courage to reveal it.

I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.

Jeanette Winterson

What is life? Life is living in this moment, experiencing and experimenting but experience isn’t life. Life is reflecting and meditating but reflection isn’t life. Life is helping and guiding but philanthropy isn’t life. Life is eating and drinking but food isn’t life. Life is reading and dancing but art isn’t life. Life is kissing and pleasuring but sex isn’t life. Life is winning and losing but competition isn’t life. Life is loving and caring but love isn’t life. Life is birthing and nurturing but children aren’t life. Life is letting go and surrendering but death isn’t life. Life is all these things but all these things aren’t life. Life is always more.

A writer should feel deeply from his heart of the joys and sorrows of people. And he must write as honestly as possible. Then only can he claim to be a writer.

Writing is not a hobby. It's the only way I get to shut up the demons in my head.

dear me i think i can run miles after miles through my mind by imaginary flyover ,gather all together to write down on my notebook.

Tonight is the night of telling our stories. You tell three and I four.

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

Novel-writing has in one respect an affinity to the drama—that time and distance are required to soften for use the harsher features that may be exhibited from real life; that it was almost impossible to bring forward events without touching on their causes; and that any tendency to political discussion, however liberal or applicable, was not to be tolerated in a sort of work which people took up with no other design than to be amused at the least possible expence of thought.

Charlotte Turner Smith

it is important to stress that history is always constructed, not absolute or unchallangeable. Histories are stories about the past, and reconstructing the past ill involve elements of mythologising from the cultural, political and theoretical stances of both the historian and the informants.

...sometimes offering a quality daily opinion about what’s going on in American politics feels like trying to compose a beautiful symphony using only the recorded screams of psychiatric patients.

Caitlin Johnstone

If typos are God's way of keeping a writer humble, plot holes certainly keeps one on their knees.

E.A. Bucchianeri

Shigure: G'morning.Tohru: Good mo

You ask me why I write. You might as well ask me why I breathe. I need oxygen to feed my body and ink to feed my soul.

Turning things over and over in isolation had led me to a certain point, but I knew that to get any further I'd have to voice some ideas aloud, just to see how they sounded. But I certainly didn't go to Ellie expecting any kind of constructive input on her part. It was more that I'd hit a wall and needed someone to talk around the subject with - like when you come up against a problem that's just immune to normal logic.

In the still of the night, when you are serenely falling asleep and an epiphany suddenly hits you. Roll your ass off that bed and start typing because that fleeting moment will never pass by you again...You can sleep when your dead!!!

Racheal Lachman

To increase the chances of a writer trying to kill themselves, cut off their hands.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

…you either do or do not have a comedy mind, whatever that is, maybe a heightened sense of the ridiculous and the absurdity of life…We are all crazy and crazed.

People say it is not the key to happiness, but I have always figured if you have enough money you can have a key made.

I said, "Is there!" I told him there is a Mafia school where they teach them math — if Johnny has ten fingers and they cut off two, how many does he have left?

Somehow, some way, every person in the arts has to find an accommodation with disappointment and embarrassment. They are the pollen in the air we breathe.

It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything — staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change.

Laughing made me feel safe. I was not going to be enveloped by the seediness that coated this world like dust.

When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.

I am driven. Being driven is my energy source. It is my fun.…I believe that where there is action, there is movement, and those ripples will eventually produce something positive.

The revelation that personal truth can be the foundation of comedy, that outrageousness can be cleansing and healthy…

The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a button, cannot program it.

Everything comes out of smoke and mist and nothingness, a mystical happening…

Liked" was the kiss of death. "Loved" or "hated" interested him. At least the performer had aroused emotion.

Maybe that is why in my comedy I try and puncture the hypocrisy all around us, why it is almost a crusade with me to strip life down to what really is true.

…but I think comedy is more aggressive than that. It is a medium for revenge. We can deflate and punish the pomposity and the rejection which hurt us. Comedy is power.

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