“The people you love most are the people about whom you know the most details.” - Ron Marasco and Brian Shuff, “About Grief”
Writing poetry is “self-forgetfulness. That is the suffering of being human —self-consciousness.“ When she can get beyond it, that, she said, "is the great liberation.”
-Marie Howe from “The Work of Art”
“Aloneness gives one the room and the incentive to make art-and gets you in the habit of talking to yourself.”
-Adam Moss
“I haven’t had a novel begin to bore me. And that’s probably because I keep thinking I will find a way to make it better. But you know it’s also true that you don’t want to take forever to write a novel because you don’t want to get to the point where the book ceases to be—I guess, you just don’t want to outgrow it.“
-Michael Cunningham
“I think it’s really hard to comfortably separate talent from this unquenchable interest in the problem presented by the task…and I started writing and realized that I felt that way about writing. That the fundamental question, Can you do some sort of justice to life using only words and ink? was endlessly interesting to me.”
-Michael Cunningham
“Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.”
-Virginia Woolf
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.
Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, who lived nearly a century, on how to grow old.
Beware feeling you’re not good enough to deserve it.
Beware feeling you’re too good to need it.
Beware all the hatred you’ve stored up inside you, and the locks on your tender places.Audre Lorde, from a letter to Pat Parker in December 1985
Maturity is when you realize people can’t give you what they can’t give themselves, so you stop expecting loyalty from people who betray themselves, stop expecting honesty from people who lie to themselves, and stop expecting peace from people who are at war with themselves.
So accurate!
(via quotethat)
