Main Entry: commonplace book
Function: noun
Date: 1578
: a book of memorabilia

"As Max W. Thomas puts it, 'commonplace books are about memory, which takes both material and immaterial form; the commonplace book is like a record of what that memory might look like.'"
   —Paul Dyck "Reading and Writing the Commonplace: Literary Culture Then and Now" (Re)Soundings (Winter 1997)

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"What an overwhelming lesson to all artists! Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous, solution. Be brave, be brave!"
   —Isak Dinesen, from "The Deluge at Nordenay"

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about."
   —Charles Kingsley

"Deliverance was originally written in a very heavily charged prose, somewhat reminiscent of James Agee. But it was too juicy. It detracted from the narrative thrust, which is the main thing that the story has going for it. So I spent two or three drafts taking that quality out. I want a kind of unobtrusively remarkable observation that wouldn't call attention to itself. That's why I made the narrator an art director. He's a guy who would see things like this; a writer would perform all kinds of cakewalks to be brilliant stylistically, which would have interfered with the narrative drive of the story."
   —James Dickey, Paris Review interview

"I would have the Book of Common Prayer kept in Latin. Rite is the link between the dead and the unborn and needs a timeless language, which in practice means a dead language."
   —W. H. Auden, Paris Review interview

"I like worry. It makes for a kind of vigilance."
   —Maguy Marin, The New York Times, January 1995

"By your power it is done
that in the sky of being
my path is thrown."
   —from "Facing," by May Swenson

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."
   —T. S. Eliot

"His biographer reports that Mr. Davies has often dreamed about his mother's ghost. Asked whether he believes in supernatural emanations, he says: "I believe in them the way Shakespeare believed in them. They're a way of exemplifying something which you know to be true but which is very hard to give substance to. Why does Hamlet see his father's ghost? It's in order that he may recognize what he knows in the depths of his own mind. It doesn't really mean that people are floating around in nighties looking for somebody to scare."
   —an interview with Robertson Davis, NY Times Book Review, 1995

"An artist is the man with the courage of his own perversions."
   —psychoanalyst and poet Adam Phillips

"The sleep of novels as they are read is soundless/ like the sleep of dresses on the warm bodies of women"
   —from "The Sleep," by Mark Strand

"There is no delight the equal of dread. If it were possible to sit, invisible, between two people on any train, in any waiting room or office, the conversation overheard would time and again circle on that subject. Certainly the debate might appear to be about something entirely different; the state of the nation, idle chat about death on the roads, the rising price of dental care; but strip away the metaphor, the innuendo, and there, nestling at the heart of the discourse, is dread. While the nature of God, and the possibility of eternal life go undiscussed, we happily chew over the minutiae of misery. The syndrome recognizes no boundaries; in bath-house and seminar-room alike, the same ritual is repeated. With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate."
   —Clive Barker, "Dread"

"Writing pornography and action novels forced me to be an entertainer. Some literary types might think this isn't a very high goal, but it certainly is for me. I envisioned my work as a seduction of my readers. ...An action novel has to engage the reader at every page. There's no time for self-indulgent self-reflection. If something isn't happening, the reader will leave -- it's as simple as that.
"So I had learned to seduce my readers and to engage my readers. Those are lessons that any writer can live with; they are lessons that every writer should learn to live with."
   —John Preston, "My Life as a Pornographer"

"Because hard core performs an obvious physical function, literary critics have traditionally refused to consider it a form of art. By their standards, art is something that appeals to such intangibles as the soul and the imagination; anything that appeals to the genitals belongs to the category of massage. What they forget is that language can be used in many delicate and complex ways to enliven the penis. It isn't just a matter of bombarding the reader with four-letter words. As Lionel Trilling said in a memorably sane essay on the subject:
"I see no reason in morality (or in aesthetic theory) why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature, to arouse desire, and I can discover no ground for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc."
   —Kenneth Tynan, "In Defense of Hard Core," quoted by John Preston in "My Life as a Pornographer"

"Being able to change the ending is one of the recurrent themes for people who live in the sexual underground. The idea that altering one's sexual activity can also alter one's self-image and place in the world is constantly repeated in conversation and in action."
   —John Preston, "My Life as a Pornographer"

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   —from Paula, by Isabel Allende

"The mind selects, enhances and betrays; happenings fade from memory; people forget one another and, in the end, all that remains is the journey of the soul, those rare moments of spiritual revelation. What actually happened isn't what matters, only the resulting scars and distinguishing marks. My past has little meaning; I can see no order to it, no clarity, purpose, or path, only a blind journey guided by instinct and detours caused by events beyond my control. There was no deliberation on my part, only good intentions and the faint sense of a greater design determining my steps."

"I always believed I was different; as long as I can remember I have felt like an outcast, as if I didn't really belong to my family, or to my surroundings, or to any group. I suppose that it is from that feeling of loneliness the questions arise which lead one to write, and that books are conceived in the search for answers."

"The joyful process of engendering a child, the patience of gestation, the fortitude to bring it into life, and the feeling of profound amazement with which everything culminates can be compared only to writing a book. Children, like books, are voyages into one's inner self, during which body, mind, and soul shift course and turn toward the very center of existence."

"Houses need births and deaths to become homes."

"Recently, I have been empty, my inspiration has dried up, but it is also possible that stories are creatures with their own lives and that they exist in the shadows of some mysterious dimension; in that case, it will be a question of opening so that they may enter, sink into me, and grow until they are ready to emerge transformed into language. They do not belong to me, they are not my creations, but, if I succeed in breaking down the wall of anguish in which I am enclosed, I can again serve them as medium."

"Perhaps old age is a new beginning, maybe we can return to the magic time of infancy, to that time before linear thought and prejudices when we perceived the universe with the exalted senses of the mad and were free to believe the unbelievable and to explore worlds that later, in the age of reason, vanished."

"I would like to fly on a broomstick, and dance in the moonlight with demons; I want to become a wise old crone, to learn ancient spells and healers' secrets. Witches, like saints, are solitary stars that shine with a light of their own; they depend on nothing and no one, which is why they have no fear and can plunge blindly into the abyss with the assurance that instead of crashing to earth, they will fly back out. They can change into birds and see the world from above, or worms to see it from within, they can inhabit other dimension and travel to other galaxies, they are navigators on an infinite ocean of consciousness and cognition."

"A novel is a long drawn-out project in which endurance and discipline count most. It is like embroidering a complex needlepoint with many-colored floss; it is worked on the wrong side, patiently, stitch by stitch, taking care to see that the knots are not visible and following a vague design that can be appreciated only at the end when the last thread is in place and the tapestry is turned to the right side to judge the completed effect. With a little luck, the charm of the whole masks the defects and flaws in the execution."

"Perhaps we are in the world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars."

"I don't believe that there are independent spirits of the dead that come to you to pull your legs when you're asleep. No. I think that we are all particles of some sort of universal spirit. If we can get over this idea of our little bodies, our little selfishness and greed, this idea that we are something individual, just forget about it and tune into the wonderful, peaceful idea that we are just part of something that is there and is whole and that when you die you will go back to that living thing that is whole and is part of your grandson and part of the flowers and part of everything that surrounds you and will prevail, then the spirit has a sense. Because it's not you. It's everywhere. You're just a particle of something that's beyond you. Then you understand the legends, the myths. You understand why so many people at certain point do the same thing or dream the same thing or hope for the same thing or fear the same thing. Because you're just part of that wholeness. When you reach that point, then you believe, as I do, that my grandmother lives in me and in my grandson and in my future great-grandchildren. And that when I need her I don't have to sit at a three-legged table with a candle and use tarot cards to bring her to me. I just have to listen. I have to ask.... So that's what it's all about. And I hope that when I die I will have been able to, during my life, plant little seeds in the souls of my children and my grandchildren so that when they need something from me I will always be available. That's the way I believe the spirit works."

"It's strange the miracles that books work!... You write a book and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shore. And there, you see, sometimes it falls into the hands of the right person."

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"Do I believe that in certain states of consciousness the body becomes almost redundant and our spirit takes trips, visits states of being that are absolutely as valid as the reality which we are occupying? And that these can be arenas of education and healing? Yes, I absolutely believe that. And do I believe that in such conditions disparate spirits can meet and converge and maybe even learn from each other? Yes, I absolutely believe that."
   —Clive Barker

"Sleep can liberate us into another condition.... a state in which ideas and images and maybe the spiritual presence of others, dead, alive, journeying, are also possibilities, presences."
   —Clive Barker

"Tell me something that I can use. Tell me something that will delight me and please me. That will change my life for the better in some way. This is sort of my ethic as a writer. It's what I try to do in my books... I am adamant that when I tell you something it should be at least half for your sake."
   —Richard Ford

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   —G is for Grafton, Sue:

"I began to use the journal technique... and I've become more dependent on it as the books proceed. Each book feels impossible. Each time I write a book I think, I surely cannot do this. I have no skill. I have nothing left to say. It's going to be undoable. It will surely defeat me. Which is why I sit and whine throughout these journals. But when a book is finished and I've tucked away the journal and tucked the finished draft of the book away and I'm stuck on the next book, I will often go back and read my journal and I realize that is part of the process. So it's very reassuring to realize where I was, at this juncture, in the book before."

"My father, C.W. Grafton, was a full-time attorney who wrote mysteries on the side... He always said to me, 'It is miracle enough if I have an idea translated into marks on a page and someone else can read those marks and have the same idea appear in their minds.' …What he gave me were all the tools necessary to survive as a writer. I feel so many people have the ability but they can't withstand the long apprenticeship that every artist must go through. So that if they have the courage or the technique for survival, and they can hang in long enough to learn their craft, they might be fine writers. But often people get discouraged and disheartened and give up way too prematurely."

"My life is generally quite placid and I live a lot of my day at the machine writing. It's not as though I'm out there facing the bad guys or the monsters in the world. So dreams keep me connected to very dark matters. And often very visceral experiences. In my own life I have carefully engineered the world so that I don't have to face these same demons."

"Sometimes I believe these books are already written and my job is simply to allow them to come through me. My job is to get out of my own way so that I can let the process take care of me. But that's scary stuff.... It does sound like channeling, and it's not quite that, but truly it's not that far from what I imagine channeling would be about."

"Then the question is: Can we keep the story moving at a pace that will hold the reader's interest? Is there enough balance between pacing, narrative and dialogue to give some variety as the reading progresses?"

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"My writing, the whole thrust of it, has been to say, 'Listen to the lessons of the flesh.' Never get too far away from it, whether it's with an ideal like Communism or a religion like Catholicism. Never get too far away. If you pay attention to what people feel as fleshly beings you will have compassion for them. It's when you divorce yourself from the flesh, when you say that is not important and you repress it completely that you're capable of building systems that really hurt people, like Fascism."
   —Anne Rice

"I'm pretty dull. And I do think the writing of a large imaginative work takes a kind of obsession, an immersion in its reality to the point where the life lived outside its pages seems duller."
   —Clive Barker

"I don't believe there are many true solutions to the world's various ills without spiritual solutions, which for me means imaginative solutions, means reaching what I think is the divine part of us -- our imagination. One of the things the imagination does is allow you to access other people's lives. In imagining another person's thoughts and feelings, you better understand them. It's the only way to fight the phobias that are in everybody, the only way to fight the animal impulse to view the world tribally, making everybody unlike us the enemy."
   —Clive Barker

"Keep your body as though you might live forever; keep you soul as though you might die tomorrow."
   —St. Augustine

"A man must rob a thousand libraries to write a book."
   —Samuel Johnson

"Every book will teach you the lessons you need to learn to write that book."
   —Eudora Welty

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   —from Marguerite Yourçenar, "Sistine"

"Imperfect beings become agitated and couple in order to complete themselves, but purely beautiful things are as solitary as the grief of man."

"Of all man's regrets, perhaps the cruelest is that for the unachieved."

"We love because we are not able to endure being alone. For the same reason, we fear death."

"And so you are departing. I am no longer young enough to attach importance to a separation, even if it is definitive. I know too well that the beings we love and who love us best are imperceptibly departing from us at every moment that passes.
"...Do not misunderstand my tears, Gherardo: it is better that those we love should go while we are still able to weep for them. If you were to stay, perhaps your presence, superimposing itself, would weaken the image of the presence I want to preserve. Just as your clothing is but the envelope of your body, you are no longer anything for me but the envelope of that other person whom I have disengaged from you and who will live long after you. Gherardo, you are now more beautiful than yourself.
"One possesses for all eternity only the friends from whom one has parted."

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"...nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road."
   —Georg Simmel, introduction to The Teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda

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   —from Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
"Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
"So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead...."

"Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood."

"Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore."

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"August 11, 1983. In the rather dirty outside rearview mirror of our car, parked in Hopewell, three teenage boys seen at a distance of, say, twenty? thirty? feet -- I feel a tug of envy for their lives or do I mean their bodies -- which they inhabit without question or speculation or dismay or dread -- easy, effortless. It's a queer long moment, minutes probably, while Ray is in a nearby store. The thought of slipping into another body, acquiring another life, not in fictional terms (that is, wanting more experiences, other angles of vision, etc. ) but in sheerly physical terms (wanting more life & that ease in life.)"
   —Joyce Carol Oates, journal entry, "Delerium and Detachment"

"The essence of the freelance life is freedom. Idleness is part of freedom and shouldn't alarm you: you will find soon enough that you have more than enough on your plate. Relish these periods of rest. To be a freelancer it is also necessary to believe, to know, to know profoundly, that one is going to be all right -- however unlikely it seems at any particularly distressing moment. This faith your friends cannot give you: it is something you have to discover in yourself."
   —V. S. Naipul in a letter to Paul Theroux, quoted in The New Yorker

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   —from Thoreau's Walden

"...as if you could kill time without injuring eternity."

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically."

"The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind."

"In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high."

"...and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."

"Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man's providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies?"

"I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust."

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion."

"But lo! men have become the tools of their tools."

"And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt?"

"It would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run."

"In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth in not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely."

"... the man who goes alone can start to-day."

"There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted."

"To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"

"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts."

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived....I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."

"And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?"

"If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business."

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"Novels are narratives, and narrative, whatever its medium -- words, film, strip-cartoon -- holds the interest of an audience by raising questions in their minds, and delaying the answers."
   —David Lodge, The Art of Fiction

"Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war...And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stony stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known."
   —Victor Shklovsky, quoted in David Lodge, The Art of Fiction

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   —from The Letters of Anne Sexton

"I hope to reach the stage where I can stop begging for more and find myself giving, regardless of what I get..."

"The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not. The trade winds blow me, and I do not know where the land is; the waves fold over each other; they are in love with themselves; sleeping in their own skin; and I float over them and I do not know about tomorrow."

"Poetry has saved my life and I respect it beyond both or any of us."

"A poet, in the long run, must be selfish; if he wants to be a best writer he can't spend time on friends' work."

"I think I will have to god him again; gods are so necessary and splendid and distant."

"...the future is my own. I am trying to steer. I paddle my own craft with toothpick oars."

"What do we do with our old hate? I feel as if, now, I were taking each one of her bones, separately, and carrying them to a soft basket. It is hard too, when people die slowly, slowly, slowly; bone by bone to the soft basket..."

"I am a kind of secret beatnik hiding in the suburbs in my square house on a dull street."

"There are no new Gods to find. So I must convert to myself."

"I hereby apply for a permit to visit your soul, on and around the date of need. I am a soft lady and will not bristle nor mar the atmosphere of said soul and will, in fact, honor its scars and shine its perfections. If you will award this permit, I will accept it without specific obligations on your part and hereby promise not to be influenced, comprimised (can't spell it), or reminded that this soul is the biggest rooming house, with the softest feather beds. In fact, Kind Sir, if you can allow me the honor, I will be a level lovely loving friend..."

"But then lust is so inadequate. And loving exhausts me."

"I'm lost. And it's my own fault. It's about time I figured out that I can't ask people to keep me found."

"There is too much food and no one left over/to eat up all the weird abundance."
   —from "The Black Art," by Anne Sexton

"I think that writers must try not to avoid knowing what is happening. Everyone has somewhere the ability to mask the events of pain and sorrow, call it shock...when someone dies for instance you have this shock that carries you over it, makes it bearable. But the creative person must not use this mechanism anymore than they have to in order to keep breathing. Other people may. But not you, not us... I, myself, alternate between hiding behind my own hands, protecting myself anyway possible, and this other, this seeing ouching other. I guess I mean that creative people must not avoid the pain that they get dealt. I say to myself, sometimes repeatedly, "I've got to get the hell out of this hurt"... But no. Hurt must be examined like a plague."

"I always think prizes are for parents so they'll know."

"Though I've never really lied to you; I often lie to myself. It's the same thing, really."

"Probably I am a fool...most poets are fools...but for some reason I love faith, but have none."

"Almost every day my desk is my world."

"It was built on air and ghosts...it was truly beautiful but it died...because it tried to get real and it was never real."

"Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by ghosts."
   —quoting a letter by Franz Kafka

"Your silence has been with me and I have let it have its say. I feel, as always, the same closeness to you which your silence makes into a kind of speech of its own."

"The soul is, I think, a human being who speaks with the pressure of death at his head."

"But there came a time when I picked you and knew it to be my happiness."

"When (to me) death takes you and puts you thru the wringer, it's a man. But when you kill yourself it's a woman."

"I look at it this way (magically) that there are those that are killed and the few who kill and then the other kind, those that do both at once..."

"And I feel so lonely and so vulnerable and strange in their little straight-backed chair. I feel so lonely. I feel worse -- strange. And when I leave on my thin and bony legs, with my big feet and my awkward pocketbook I cry in the car. And I say to myself that the trouble with life is that people are strangers."

"I seem to be a ship sailing out of my own life."

"To eat raspberries (I just ate a cupful) is to live. To take sleeping pills (four a night every night as I do) is to die."

"I don't dare walk outside where the sky must hurt even extra with its full load of stars. The sky outside must ring. Do you remember how winter snow nights could ring? You'd think the trees would fall to their knees with it all night long. Yet, they do not. And still the stars sustain such interest."

"Hell! I'm undisciplined too, in everything but my work...and the discipline the reworking the forging into being is the stuff of poetry...the original impulse is only that...and perhaps often poets get that as a gift. But it is what you do with the gift that makes the difference. Everyone in the world seems to be writing poems...but only a few climb into the sky."

"Fight for the poem. Put your energy into it. Force discipline upon madness. Guard yourself against the easy thing."

"I live the wrong life for the person I am. I'm tall and thin and that's all right with me, but my life is square and small and I wish I had a maid but that wouldn't help, and I wish I lived in Italy but that wouldn't help. But the only important part of the story is that I started to write, and it was a solitary act..."

"Poetry to me is prayer -- the rest of it is leftovers."

"Poets can't live for/die for/live with/breathe in nothing but themselves -- they need the sensible people, the roots, the down the house world of people...He is good for me for he has complete plans on how to run each day. He is with the world. I am not of it whatsoever."

"I want to try my hand, my heart on this foreign, mysterious, precious language. It is not easy for me to write well. Sentences come hard. But I am ready to try again. I am ready to spend four years or ten years or all years on what this novel must have.... Further, a novel is a lot less 'part time' than a poem. A novel eats time, and its characters refuse to do dishes and iron blouses. A novel seems so big, so 'full time.' I cannot hold it in my arms like a poem, though one may have to hold a poem in his arms for a week or even for years."

"I don't think people write on walls to get a wide audience but rather to declare that piece of wall their own."

"I am a witch, an enchantress of sorts and have already been worshipped and hung in the same order."

"A lovely woman singing always makes me think of you. It's Puccini. The song of a beautiful woman -- her soul exposed -- her voice lifting like a kite -- an eternal sound."

"...madness is not hysteria. It can be very quiet..."

"May you be giddy, and may the ice hold you no matter how many gold bricks you wear on your back."

"But there's just so much time and if one feels committed, as I do, to writing SOMETHING -- for good or bad -- then one must absolutely discard anything that is too interruptive or costly emotionally."

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"The French (originally Bulgarian) structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov has proposed that tales of the supernatural divide into three categories: the marvelous, in which no rational explanation of the supernatural phenomena is possible; the uncanny, in which it is; and the fantastic, in which the narrative hesitates undecidedly between a natural and a supernatural explanation."
   —David Lodge, The Art of Fiction

"There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven--"
   —Jorie Graham, from "Over and Over Stitch"

"Oscar Wilde wrote somewhere that the worst crime of all is a lack of imagination: the human being has no feeling for evils he has not directly experienced or participated in. I have often thought that the sealed freight-cars and the well-built walls of the concentration camps insured the extension and duration of crimes against humanity which would have been stopped sooner had they taken place in the open air and in full view. In the public squares of the Middle Ages and the Grand Siecle, habit surely numbed some of the spectators; yet there were always those affected by the sight, even if they did not protest loudly, and their whispers were finally heard. The executioners of our day take better precautions."
   —Marguerite Yourçenar, "A Civilization in Watertight Compartments"

"To the poet his travels, his adventures, his loves, his indignations are finally resolved in verse and this in the end becomes his permanent, indestructible life."
   —Tennessee Williams

Dec. 28-1938-Wed.-How strange! Immediately after the above entry I find myself that here I actually am in a completely new scene-New Orleans-the Vieux Carre. Preposterous? Well, rather! Somehow or other things do manage to happen in my life.... I am delighted, in fact enchanted with this glamorous, fabulous old town. I've been here about 3 hours but have already wandered about the Vieux Carre and noted many exciting possibilities. Here surely is the place I was made for if any place on this funny old world.
"I am lying on the floor in front of a gas grate at about 2 A.M. to make this entry. I feel very quiet & comfortable-but full of anticipation! If only it can be done-financially- if only only! Much will happen I am sure in the days, weeks or months to come-
"Sufficient to say now that I am sleepy and happy or as nearly happy as old T.L.W. is able to be! The bed looks clean-I hope it is!-Tomorrow I will go out first thing to locate a cheap furnished room in the artists' section...En Avant!"
   —Tennessee Williams, journal entry

"Today I wrote one very good line- 'The past keeps getting bigger and bigger at the future's expense.'-Too good to be good in a play. The tragedy of a poet writing drama is that when he writes well-from the dramaturgic, technical pt. of view he is often writing badly. One must learn-(that is the craft, I suppose)-to fuse lyricism and realism into a congruous unit. I guess my chief trouble is that I don't. I make the most frightful faux pas.
"I feared today that I may have taken a distinctly wrong turn in turning to drama. But, oh, I do feel drama so intensely sometimes."
   —Tennessee Williams, in his journal of 1939

-----
   —from Heaven's Coast, by Mark Doty

"Not that things need to be able to die in order for us to love them, but that things need to die in order for us to know what they are."

"Remembering is the work of the living, and the collective project of memory is enormous; it involves the weight of all our dead..."

"Certainly the past is accomplished, complete; what has been is over and nothing can change it now, nothing can change except our perspectives, the way we interpret or understand. And the future is infinite, if not our personal fates then that great flux of matter and spirit which goes on, in which we will in some way participate--as energy if not as individuals."

"The world doesn't need us to continue, although it does need us to attend, to study, to name. We are elements of the world's consciousness of itself, and thus we are necessary: replaceable and irreplaceable at once."

"As if desire were our enemy, instead of the ineradicable force that binds us to the world."

"Do the dead dissolve their individuality back into the world?"

"Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind."

"Where could it be clearer, here in the heart of abandonment, what love achieves?"

"When you don't know where you're going, go by a way you don't know."
   —Chinese proverb, quoted by Doty

"Who needs the full story of any life?" James Merrill wrote in his memoir, A Different Person. And who needs the full story of any death? Scenes imply the whole, delineate it. ...All we need as an audience are essential gestures.
"But how to identify, looking at one's own life, the signifying moments?

"Marriage is a pact with someone else's memory."
   —the poet David Wojahn, quoted by Doty

"I can't stop thinking of a line of graffiti in Chicago, spray-painted on a lakeshore wall...
"Does a snowflake in an avalanche feel responsible?" …Of course it doesn't; of course I do. Not responsible for the avalanche, but to it, responsible in its wake."

"Whatever this being of ours is, in its depth and complexity, we see only a little of it, and that little bit is too much for us, incomprehensible. If we know so little of ourselves, what could we hope to know about the dead?
"In not-knowing, hope resides."

-----
I
Thy soul shall find itself alone
'Mid dark thoughts of the gray tomb-stone--
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy:

II
Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness--for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee--and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.

III
The night -- tho' clear -- shall frown --
And the stars shall look not down,
From their high thrones in the heaven,
With light like Hope to mortals given --
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever.

IV
Now are thoughts thou shall not banish --
Now are visions ne'er to vanish --
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more -- like dew-drop from the grass.

V
The breeze -- the breath of God -- is still
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy -- shadowy -- yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token --
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries! --

"Spirits of the Dead"
   —Edgar Allan Poe

"Gist of criticisms (Diana Trilling, etc.) of my novel is if they had my automobile they wouldn't visit my folks, they'd visit theirs."
   —Dawn Powell, journals

"Wits are never happy people. The anguish that has scraped their nerves and left them raw to every flicker of life is the base of wit.... True wit should break a good man's heart."
   —Dawn Powell, journals, 1939

"The silence of God is God."
   —from Elie Wiesel, in "The Angel of History" by Carolyn Forché

"Surely art is the result of ones having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end."
   —from "The Angel of History," by Carolyn Forché

"Expected to live three or four days, Walt Whitman lived four months breathing at 1/16th of his lung capacity... The cost to hear the poet lecture was ten cents; Andrew Carnegie paid $400."
   —David S. Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman's America, in an interview.

"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."
   —Mary Oliver, "Of Power and Time" in Blue Pastures

"But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple -- or a green field -- a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing -- an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness -- wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak -- to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed. I remember the delicate, rumpled way into the woods, and the weight of the books in my pack. I remember the rambling, and the loafing -- the wonderful days when, with Whitman, I tucked my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time."
   —Mary Oliver, "My Friend Walt Whitman" in Blue Pastures

-----
   —Colette, from the short story, "Bella Vista"

"The sulphurous smell of the seaweed, the broken shells, the feeble waves which rose and fell with advancing or retreating gave me a sudden terrible longing for Brittany. I longed for its tides, for the great rollers off St. Malo which rush in from the ocean, imprisoning constellations of starfish and jellyfish and hermit crabs in the heart of each greenish wave. I longed for the swift incoming tide with its plumes of spray; the tide which revived the thirsty mussels and the little rock oysters and reopened the cups of the sea anemones. The Mediterranean is not the sea."

"The prudent weariness of age keeps me from running any risk of forgetting that a sovereign blue collar weighs down on the imaginary rooftops of Bella-Vista, or that the west wind rises fresh toward noon, or that sleep, in the breezy shade, is conducive to dreaming and speaks, to the trusting sleeper, of motionless ships and islands free from danger."

"The night was murmurous and warmer than the day. Three or four lighted windows, the clouded sky patched here and there with stars, the cry of some night bird over this unfamiliar place made my throat tighten with anguish. It was an anguish without depth; a longing to weep which I could master as soon as I felt it rise. I was glad of it because it proved that I could still savor the special taste of loneliness."

"That mysterious attraction of what we do not like is always dangerous. It is fatally easy to go on staying in a place which has no soul, provided that every morning offers us the chance to escape."

"Petty observations, petty kindnesses, petty pieces of spite -- indications, all of them, that my awareness was becoming sharper, yet deteriorating too. One begins by noticing the absence of a Monsieur Daste and soon one descends to 'The lady at table 6 took three helpings of French beans...' Horrors, petty horrors."

-----

"I not only discovered that it was life that I truly longed for, but that all which is most valuable in life is escaping from the narrow cubicle of one's self to a sort of veranda between the sky and the still water beach (allegorically speaking) and to a hammock beside another beleaguered being, someone else who is in exile from the place and time of his heart's fulfillment."
   —Tennessee Williams, writing about "The Night of the Iguana" and his stay in Mexico in the summer of 1940

"Oh, Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell;
Not only in that golden tree,
But in the frightened heart of me?"
   —Tennessee Williams, from "The Night of the Iguana"

-----
   —Quotations taken from Marguerite Yourçenar: With Open Eyes, Conversations with Matthieu Galey

"If anything I feel that I am still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages."

"My religious education came to an end very early, but I feel lucky to have had it, because it showed me the way to the invisible, of if you prefer, to the 'interior' world. People who have had no religious instruction...remain cut off from mythical truth, from the everyday manifestations of the sacred."

"There are certain areas, such as religion and poetry, that must remain obscure. Or dazzling, which comes to the same thing."

"It pleases me to think that one's style improves throughout life, as one sheds the scale of imitation, simplifies, finds one's path, while the underpinnings remain, shored up or, rather, strengthened by the experience."

"Most writers begin, or used to begin, by writing poetry. Which is quite natural, since rhythm sustains as well as constrains. There's an element of song in poetry, and an element of play and of repetition, which makes things easier. Prose is an ocean in which one could easily drown."

"When it comes to making a book, you've got to know how to wait."

"In fiction, you have a character speak in his own name...which is really a monologue in the third person singular, so then you end up putting yourself in the place of the person evoked. You find yourself in a particular situation, that of this particular individual, at this particular time, in this particular place. This roundabout course is the best way to capture both the human and the universal."

"The point is to sharpen your view, to place the subject where you can see it best.... the present is so limited -- it's now, you and I, here in this room, talking to one another, nothing more -- and it's already different from the moment when you arrived this morning. This present moment, brief as it is, is also vast and full of relationships that elude us, which we can begin to unravel only by achieving a certain distance from it.... At any rate I've always been suspicious of what people take to be immediate, which is often only reality's most superficial aspect... But I have no objection to the present, as long as the subject requires or lends itself to such treatment. Writing in the present is infinitely more difficult, however. The eye you need to filter events as they are happening is extremely difficult to acquire. The danger is that you wind up doing journalism."

"Increasingly I've noticed that the way to penetrate most deeply into another person is to listen to his voice, to understand the melody of his being. ... A voice consists of a specific tone, a specific way of expressing things, a specific way of establishing a relationship between the person speaking and the person being spoken to.... You've got to work to hear, you've got to create a silence within yourself in order to hear what Hadrian or Zeno would say in a particular situation. And you must take care never to put in your own voice, or at least see to it that what you do put in of yourself is at the level of the unconscious: you nourish your characters with your being as you might feed them your flesh, which is not at all the same thing as feeding them your own petty personality with all the idiosyncrasies that make us who we are."

"The day the book [Alexis] was accepted was fair and cold. I left the publishers with the munificent sum of 100 francs (or was it 150?) which I had been given as an advance -- in those days an advance still meant something -- and then, well, it was a first novel, they were really quite generous to give it to me. I walked, I think, along the rue Froideveaux to the place Vendome, enjoying Paris and telling myself, It's just a little book, you never know what will happen, but still, now I'm a writer, I have my place alongside everyone else who has ever written in French. I was a happy woman. I went into the Lalique store, which still existed at that time, and bought, for precisely 150 francs, a blue vase. It was a milky blue, like the color of that wintry day. I still have it."

"Sensual relations are sacred because they are universal."

"What needs to be restored is the feeling that pleasure is a gateway to knowledge or to God, if you want to put it that way, or to another being in all its divine poverty. I am convinced that pleasure can serve as such a gateway."

"For myself, whenever I had to choose between liberty and security, I always chose liberty. When it comes right down to it, I have always loathed possessiveness, acquisitiveness, and greed, and I despise the notion that success is equivalent to amassing a fortune."

"Myth, for me, represents a way of approaching the absolute, a way of delving beneath the human surface to discover what is durable, or, to use a rather big word, eternal."

"The writer's solitude is profound indeed. Each writer is unique, with his own problems and his own technique, painstakingly acquired. And every writer has a life of his own. There isn't much to be gained from talking about literary subjects with writers you happen to know (or don't know, for that matter.) Why not spend the time rereading the books of a writer you admire?... Literary groups and movements never contribute anything but wind, and plenty of it! Wind full of dross and dust."

"When we reread the writers we admire, it's usually their adjectives which bother us."

"There is a realm of phenomena that cannot be verified. All we can do is watch, with a cautious eye."

"For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute."

"For many years now, not a day has passed when my first thought upon awakening has not been about the state of the world, as I try, for a moment at least, to immerse myself in its terrible suffering. People do somehow manage to be happy on occasion, in spite of it all; but the happiness is incommensurable with the suffering, it's of an entirely different order."

"My own philosophy -- if I may use so solemn a word -- is that I never buy anything without asking myself if in fact I couldn't do without it. Why add to the surfeit of things already in the world? I could slip the key under the door and walk away from this place without any difficulty. I would miss the birds, I would miss Joseph the squirrel, and that's it.... I don't attach a great deal of importance to the house itself, but it serves as an asylum, a cell for self-knowledge, as Saint Catherine of Siena might have said. I suppose that a sage, like one of the old Taoists, could circumnavigate the globe several times without leaving home, without ever stepping outside his cell. That would be the mark of a true sage... Wherever one dies, it's bound to be on this planet."

"The writer must soak up the subject completely, as a plant soaks up water, until the ideas are ready to sprout."

"In writing about a character in a novel, I think that one has to know a great deal more than one actually says....One must be capable of saying everything only to refrain from saying it because it isn't important."

"As long as you don't put all your intensity into a document, it remains dead, no matter what kind of document it may be."

"Writing goes very quickly once you've made up your mind... The writer is his own amanuensis. When I write I am carrying out a task, writing under my own dictation, as it were. I am performing the difficult and exhausting labor of putting my thoughts in order, straightening out my own dictation."

"Every human life is fundamentally divine."

"A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny."

"In reading any book people always look at the facet that reflects their own life."

"On moral questions we can expect unreason to rear its head again and again."

"...magic, in a word, is external. ..What is sought is always power over objects or people. That is why most people whose minds are at all above the ordinary will flirt with magic for a time but generally reject it in the end."

"One feels [upon completing a novel], first of all, that the job is done, that the long and arduous task one set for oneself at the outset has been accomplished and that, by good fortune, nothing has happened to keep one from reaching the goal. Good, it's finished. That, I think, is one's simplest feeling. After that one feels a sense of emptiness, of very deep emptiness, obviously."

"Beyond a certain threshold one speaks poetically whether one wishes to or not. Just listen to the voices of people who are angry, in love, or in moments of idle relaxation: they speak with the rhythms of poetry."

"Readers who look for personal confessions in a writer's work are readers who don't know how to read."

"One nourishes one's created characters with one's own substance: it's rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is of course necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one's own humanity."

"Writing is a job but it's also practically a game, and a pleasure; for the important thing is not the writing but the vision. I've always written my books in my mind before writing them down.... I should add, though, that habits are also useful in literary creation, because they contain an element of ritual. Getting up in the morning, going down to light a fire in the kitchen, feeding the birds, looking at the sun from the porch -- all these are rituals, which eventually become quite impersonal.... When I sit down at my desk, I know exactly what I am going to do, since I've already written it all out in my mind. Obviously the act of writing reveals some things that stand out and others that ring hollow, points up errors, and leads to fresh discoveries; but the facts, the ideas, are already in place. ... But when it comes to fictional invention, the bulk of the work is done when one sits down to write."

"The writer's calling is an art or, rather, a craft, and the method depends somewhat on the circumstances. ...I'll take several stabs at every sentence and write them all down. Later on, I'll erase those I don't like and keep those I do.... And if you're fond of writers' idiosyncrasies, here's one: on the third of fourth draft, pencil in hand, I reread my text, by this point practically a fair copy, and eliminate whatever can be eliminated, whatever seems useless. Each deletion is a triumph. At the bottom of every page I write, "crossed out seven words," "crossed out ten words," as the case may be. It gives me great pleasure to get rid of what is futile.... I try to eliminate what isn't essential, and I try not to give in, as I did in my youth, to the temptation to add ornament. Back then I thought it was necessary to round off each sentence. Now I look instead for the sharpest possible sentence, the simplest images, and I don't try to be original at all costs. In fact, I don't try anything at all; my writing is the way it is."

"Any sympathy, any comprehension extended to others, past or present, real or imaginary, enhances our chance of making contact with reality, regardless of whether those other beings accompany us through life or stand in our path."

"Very seldom have I felt alone in my life, and even then, never entirely alone. I'm alone when I work, if to be surrounded by ideas and characters born of one's own mind is to be alone. I am alone very early in the morning, when I observe the sunrise from my window or porch. And I am alone at night when I shut the door of my house after gazing out at the stars. Which is tantamount to saying that I'm not really alone."

"Every life is punctuated by deaths and departures, and each one causes great suffering that it is better to endure rather than forgo the pleasure of having known the person who has passed away. Somehow our world rebuilds itself after every death, and in any case we know that none of us will last forever. So you might say that life and death lead us by the hand, firmly but tenderly."

"Every writer is either useful or harmful, one or the other....Furthermore, since I believe that all our impulses endure forever, just as all things continue to survive in one form or another, this usefulness can perpetuate itself indefinitely. A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels of the abysses that it contains, or the line that seems to have been written for me alone. In this respect the writer is no different from any other human being: whatever we say or do can have far-reaching consequences. We must endeavor to leave behind us a world a little cleaner, a little more beautiful than it was, even if that world extends no farther than our backyard or kitchen."

"In the Bhagavad-Gita there is a passage where Krishna says to Arjuna, 'Fight as if the battle were useful for something; work as if the work were useful for something.'"

"Pessimism and optimism are two words I reject. The point is to keep one's eyes open."

"I believe that perfecting oneself is life's principal purpose. But my attention flags; willfulness or sloth gets the better of me; or I succumb to the stupidity that afflicts all of us at times. I am not at every moment what I ought to be. I do my best, when very often I might do better than my best."

"Magic wants to coerce; true religion counts on fervor and love."

"'Had I been wise, I would have been happy up to the moment of my death.'"
   —Hadrian, in Memoirs of Hadrian

"'A man who reads, reflects or plans belongs to his species rather than his sex; in his best moments he rises even above the human.'"
   —Hadrian, in Memoirs of Hadrian

"I believe that the social problem is more important than the political problem, and the moral problem more important than the social. One always comes back to the struggle between good and evil."

"...in thinking of my friends, those still living as well as those who are dead, I frequently find myself repeating the fine words that I was once told were uttered by the eighteenth century's 'unknown philosopher,' Saint-Martin, a man so unknown to me that I've never read a single line of his work or attempted to check the citation: 'They are the beings through whom God loved me.'"

"When we strike a child or let it go hungry, or when we raise a child in such a way as to warp its thinking or sap its enthusiasm for life, we are committing a crime against the universe, which manifests itself in that child. The same is true when we kill an animal for no purpose or cut down a tree without good reason. Each time we do these things we are betraying our mission as human beings, which should be to organize the universe a little better than it is now."

"I've often thought about how children could be educated. There should, I think, be basic courses at a very simple level, which would teach children that they are living in the midst of the universe on a planet whose resources they will one day need to conserve, that they depend on the air and the water and on all living creatures, and that the slightest error or act of violence could possible destroy everything. They would learn that men have killed one another in wars that have never done anything but lead to other wars, and that every country doctors its history to make itself look good. They would learn enough about the past to feel a bond to the men and women who have gone before them and to admire where admiration is due, but without setting up idols; nor should there be idols for today or for any hypothetical tomorrow. Some effort should be devoted to familiarizing the children with both books and things. They should know the names of plants and should be taught about animals, but without recourse to the horrible vivisections that children and teenagers are now required to perform on the pretext of learning biology. They should learn how to give first aid to the injured. Sex education would include attendance at a birth, and education of the mind would include witnessing the gravely ill as well as the bodies of the dead. Teachers would also instill the simple ethical ideas without which life in society is impossible. In religion, no practice or dogma would be imposed, but something would be said about all the world's great religions and particularly about those prevalent locally, in order to kindle respect for religion in the child's mind and to eliminate certain hateful prejudices. Children should be taught to love work, provided it is useful; and they should learn to see through the claims of deceptive advertising....There is surely some way to speak to children of the truly important things sooner than we do now."

-----
"Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.
"I quickly found for myself two such blessings -- the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.
"In the first of these -- the natural world -- I felt at ease; nature was full of beauty and interest and mystery, also good and bad luck, but never misuse. The second world -- the world of literature -- offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything -- other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion -- that standing within this otherness -- the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields of deep inside books -- can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."
   —Mary Oliver, "Staying Alive," Blue Pastures

"My point is that the operation of emasculation is a tiny one. It is very simple and easy to perform on men, animals, and books. It is not a Major operation but its effects are great. It is never performed intentionally on books. What we must both watch is that it should not be performed unintentionally."
   —Ernest Hemingway in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, dated February 16, 1929

"Of the many definitions of story, the simplest may be this: It is a piece of writing that makes the reader want to find out what happens next. Good writers, it is often said, have the ability to make you keep on reading them whether you want to or not -- the milk boils over, the subway stop is missed. Strong narrative writing is, at its most elementary, an act of seduction: its object is arousal. It arouses a curiosity, an interest, an expectation. It flirts with the reader, stimulates an appetite, verges on satisfying it, only to stimulate another, even greater appetite -- an appetite for more, please, now. Is it really so strange that in the eighteenth century novels were regarded as corrupting, and not the sort of thing that a young woman should be allowed to read on her own? Story means pleasure, as distinct from art; it would rather gratify than edify."
   —Bill Buford, from "The Seductions of Storytelling," The New Yorker, 1996

"A number of writers were asked to name the modern writer they deemed most overrated. Happily, the most generous-hearted response seemed the wisest as well. It came from Tennessee Williams. He observed that in our time, no serious writer is overrated."
   —as reported in The New York Times

"This morning the sea wind/is fresh, the island shines in light, and I think of a boy/I loved for his beauty, his wit, his eyes, that to me carried/a glint of their brevity, whose name still carries joy/and who made death a gift we quietly envied."
   —from "The Bounty IV" by Derek Walcott

"...a lust of the blood, a permission of the will..."
   —from Shakespeare, "Othello"

"I've discovered in my old age the joy of travel. I enjoy everything. I'm collecting oceans as a matter of fact. Last fall I added the Tasman Sea between New Zealand and Australia. I had never heard of it, and then found myself bobbing in a boat on a very cold, very wet day.
"My favorite place now is the Seychelles, a series of smallish islands in the Indian Ocean off the African coast. There's a lovely little colonial town on the largest island. The culture is a mix of Africa and India, with a funny sort of veneer of what you'd call Creole -- a lot of English and some French. The people are very helpful, very friendly and extremely beautiful, this blend of races.
"There are lovely guest houses, and the beaches and ocean are absolutely clean. There's something about walking down a beach where the only footprints are yours and they're behind you.
"Some islands have monster tortoises on them, and it sounds silly, but you get all excited when you see one. They're not at all interested in seeing you.
"You swim until the sun goes down, take a nice bath and have a French dinner outdoors, and you're ready to pack it in and go to bed. On some of the smaller islands, you're far away from lights, and the stars are unbelievable. I've never seen so many meteors in my life.
"I still go to Martha's Vineyard, but less so now than when the children were little. It's so terribly popular now. When I started, Nantucket was fashionable, and the Vineyard was not the place to go. But I did go last October for the full moon, and I love it then. We have a big cookout and watch the moon rise and there's nobody."
   —Shirley Ann Grau, Pulitzer-Prize winner, quoted in The Times-Picayune, 1994

-----
   —from Before Night Falls, by Reinaldo Arenas

"A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes the control of the military police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque; to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act."

"I could never work in pure abstinence; the body needs to feel satisfied to give free reign to the spirit."

"The body suffers more than the soul, because the soul can always find something to hang on to, a memory, a hope."

"He paid dearly for his sin, but sexual pleasure often exacts a high price; sooner or later we pay with years of sorrow for every moment of pleasure. It is not God's vengeance but that of the Devil, the enemy of everything beautiful. Beauty has always been dangerous. Marti said that everyone who is the bearer of light remains alone; I would say that anyone who takes part in certain acts of beauty is eventually destroyed. Humanity in general does not tolerate beauty, perhaps because we cannot live without it; the horror of ugliness advanced day by day at an ever-increasing pace."

"He wanted me to teach him to write, but writing is not a profession, it is a curse."

"In exile Lazaro has been the only link to my past, the only witness to my life in Cuba; with him I have always had the feeling of being able to return to that irretrievable world. It is hard to communicate, in this country or any other, if you come from the future."

-----
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."
   —Shirley Jackson, first line of The Haunting of Hill House

"It ever was, and is, and shall be, evr-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out."
   —Heraclites, epigraph to Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

-----
   —from Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple."

"Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.'"

"The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be damned, and that trying to damn it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real, where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. 'Launch into the deep,' says Jacques Ellul, 'and you shall see.'"

-----
   —from Walt Whitman:

"And if the corpse of any one I love, or if my own corpse, be
duly render'd to powder and pour'd in the sea, I shall
be satisfied.
Or if it be distrubuted to the winds I shall be satisfied."
from "Of Him I Love Day and Night"

I am he that aches with amorous love;
Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract
all matter?
So the body of me to all I meet or know.
from "I Am He that Aches with Love"

"I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of
identity beyond the grave,
But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me."
from "Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances"

"Ah lover and perfect equal,
I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections,
And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like
in you."
from "Among the Multitude"

"When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems,
seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and
become your comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am
now with you.)
from "Full of Life Now"

"Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world."
from "Song of Myself"

"What do you suppose has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and
children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there really is no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward... and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier."
from "Song of Myself"

"Oxen that rattle the yoke or halt in the shade, what is that
you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more that all the print I have read in my life."
from "Song of Myself"

"The youth lies awake in the cedar-roofed garret and harks to
the musical rain..."
from "Song of Myself"

"I play not a march for victors only... I play great marches
for conquered and slain persons."
from "Song of Myself"

"A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the
metaphysics of books."
from "Song of Myself"

"Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me."
from "Song of Myself"

"I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,
And accrue what I hear into myself....and let sounds
contribute toward me."
from "Song of Myself"

"I fly the flight of the fluid and swallowing soul,
My course runs below the soundings of plummets."
from "Song of Myself"

"I am the man... I suffered... I was there."
from "Song of Myself"

"I am an acme of things accomplished, and I an encloser of
things to be."
from "Song of Myself"

"He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher."
from "Song of Myself"

"I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one that one's-self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his
own funeral, dressed in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of
the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod
confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man
following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the
wheeled universe,
And any man or woman shall stand cool and supercilious
before a million universes."
from "Song of Myself"

"The wildest and bloodiest is over and all is peace.
…
Peace is always beautiful,
The myth of heaven indicates peace and night."
from "The Sleepers"

"Not a grave of the murdered for freedom but grows seed for
freedom... in its turn to bear seed,
Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and
the snows nourish.

Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of tyrants let loose,
But it stalks invisibly over the earth...whispering
counseling cautioning."
from "Europe the 72nd and 73rd Years of These States"

"Day fullblown and splendid...day of the immense sun,
and action and ambition and laughter,
The night follows close, with millions of suns, and sleep and
restoring darkness."
from "Great Are the Myths"

-----
   —from Henry Beston, The Outermost House

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. ...We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

"A year indoors in a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual."

"By the middle of February the sight of an unknown someone walking on the beach near the Fo'castle would have been a historical event. Should any ask how I endured this isolation in so wild a place and in the depth of winter, I can only answer that I enjoyed every moment to the full. To be able to see and study undisturbed the processes of nature -- I like better the old Biblical phrase 'mighty works' -- is an opportunity for which any man might well feel reverent gratitude, and here at last, in this silence and isolation of winter, a whole region was mine whose innermost natural life might shape itself to its ancient courses without the hindrances and interferences of man. No one came to kill, no one came to explore, no one came even to see. Earth, ocean, and sky, the triune unity of this coast, pursued each one their vast and mingled purposes as untroubled by man as a planet on its course about the sun."

"It is not easy to live alone, for man is a gregarious creature; especially in his youth, powerful instincts offer battle to such a way of life, and in utter solitude odd things may happen to the mind."

"...but I think that those who have lived in nature, and tried to open their doors rather than close them on her energies, will understand well enough what I mean. Life is as much a force in the universe as electricity or gravitational pull, and the presence of life sustains life. Individuals may destroy individuals, but the life force may mingle with the individual life as a billow of fire may mingle for a moment with a candle flame."

"Learn to reverence night and put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity. By day, space is one with the earth and with man -- it is his sun that is shining, his clouds that are floating past; at night, space is his no more. When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze. For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars -- pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. Fugitive though the instant be, the spirit of man is, during it, ennobled by a genuine moment of emotional dignity, and poetry makes its own both the human spirit and experience."

"...some have asked me what understanding of Nature one shapes from so strange a year? I would answer that one's first appreciation is a sense that the creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active to-day as they have ever been, and that to-morrow's morning will be as heroic as any of the world."

"Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy."

"The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life -- all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own. Live in Nature, and you will soon see that for all its non-human rhythm, it is no cave of pain."

"Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. ... Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth's and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach."

-----
"Revelation comes only to those who perceive with their eyes and minds."
   —August Rodin

"Reflect the surfaces, depict them correctly from every side, and movement will come; shift the masses, and create a new equilibrium."
   —August Rodin

"The works of God are by their very nature exaggerated; I am only true to them."
   —August Rodin

"But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts."
   —Marguerite Yourçenar, "The Man Who Loved the Nereids"

"Do not, like the pagans, exalt the Creation at the expense of the Creator, but do not be scandalized either by His handicraft."
   —Marguerite Yourçenar, "Our-Lady-of-the-Swallows"

"I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself."
   —Alice Munro, "The Moons of Jupiter"

"What I do not know, I know full well that I do not know, and I envy those who will eventually know more; but I know also that, exactly like me, they will be obliged to measure, weigh, deduce, and then mistrust the deductions so produced; they will have to make allowance for the part which is true in any falsehood, and likewise reckon the eternal admixture of falsity in truth. ... I have dreamed my dreams, but I do not take them for any more than dreams. I have refrained from making an idol of truth, preferring to leave it to its more modest name of exactitude. My triumphs and my dangers are not the ones people suppose: there are other glories than fame and other fires than those of the stake. I have almost attained to the point of distrusting words. I shall die a little less witless than I was born."
   —Marguerite Yourçenar's Zeno, speaking in "The Abyss"

"As a poet he blamed the weakness of his rhymes upon his campaign responsibilities; as a captain, however, he explained his tactical errors by the fact that poetry was brewing in his brain; in any case, he did creditably in both professions, though in combination they did not make for wealth."
   —Marguerite Yourçenar, "The Abyss"

"At the age of twenty he had thought himself freed of those routines and prejudices which paralyze our actions and put blinders on our understanding; but his life had been passed thereafter in acquiring bit by bit that very liberty of which he had supposed himself promptly possessed in its entirety."
   —Marguerite Yourçenar, "The Abyss"

"And finally, love is magic, as is hatred, too, imprinting as they do upon the brain the image of a being whom we allow to haunt us."
   —Marguerite Yourçenar, "The Abyss"

"Brethren, be not children in understanding; howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men."
   —1 Corinthians 14:20

"Over the course of the Ages, I have been the boy and the girl,
the tree, the winged bird, and the mute being of the depths."
   —Empedocles

"A writer thinks he is talking about many things, but what he leaves behind, if he is lucky, is an image of himself."
   —Jorge Luis Borges

"...So it's plain to be discerned
That the shades of holy men
Who have failed, being weak of will,
Pass the Door of Birth again,
And are plagued by crowds, until
They've the passion to escape."
   —W.B. Yeats, "The Three Hermits"

"And if I've really seen anything at all in these years, and passed it on, it's been just this -- the only thing that matters a whit in human life is using your mind and body, throttle-out as long as you last, to spark the gaps and to hook you to people you need and can give to."
   —Reynolds Price, The Promise of Rest

"As a novelist, my obsession is time. ...Once you have endless, vast expanses of time all your own, something happens to your unconscious creative level. Once I had the financial security to take time out, I was really able to reach into the deepest resources of my mind, where I found new perspectives on those old experiences."
   —Leslie Marmon Silko, on winning a MacArthur grant in 1991

"Kathleen Norris says the poet Maxine Kumin spoke for many writers when she defined herself as 'an unreconstructed atheist who believes in the mystical power of the creative process.' She says this typifies the struggle of poets to exist in a rational world and still honor the deep mystery they encounter in the act of writing.
"She finds this engagement with mystery the essence of what it means to be either a poet or a monk. In The Cloister Walk Norris quotes John Keats in calling this quality 'negative capability,' the potential to exist within a state of mystery or doubt without grasping for explanations."
   —from a story on Kathleen Norris in Poets & Writers

-----
   —from Donald Hall's Life Work

"Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know you are working."

"One disease of working alone -- the way writers mostly work -- is dependence on mood. Mood is no measure and flips from highest to lowest in a millisecond.
"Feeling miserable over work that fails is preferable to depression which makes work impossible."

"'Now that you are eighty, you must know the secret of life. What is the secret of life?'
...Henry Moore answered me straight: 'The secret of life is to have a task, something that you devote your life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is -- it must be something that you cannot possibly do!"

"'A second chance -- that's the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
from Henry James's "The Middle Years," quoted by Donald Hall in Life Work

"In his journals, Emerson wrote: 'To every reproach I know but one answer, namely, to go again to my work. "But you neglect your relations." Too true, then I will work the harder. "But you have no genius." Yes, then I will work the harder. "But you have detached yourself from people: you must regain some positive relation. "Yes, I will work the harder."'

-----
"When you're reading, you're writing."
   —Mary Gordon

-----
   —from Colette:
"You, who are magic itself when you recount something, you muff most of your effect when you write... 'A chorus of flatterers answered him'... 'the conversation took a harsh turn'... 'they began to judge him'... 'mocking exclamations, derisory phrases'. Do you understand that in all that no word shows me, or makes me hear, what you are talking about?... For God's sake no narrative! Touches, and detached colours; and there is no need for a conclusion, I don't care whether you ask Proust's pardon, I don't care if Sardou had been 'one of the kings of the contemporary theatre.' Do you understand? ... 'a charming and delicate dinner'... 'a conversation that wanders from one subject to another', what does that tell me? Give me a decor, the diners, and even the dishes, otherwise it won't work. And try, o my dear heart, to hide the fact that writing bores you stiff."
"But I don't know what one should put in a book."
"Neither do I, believe me," said Colette. "I have only gathered a little light on what it is better to omit. Only paint what you have seen. Look for a long time at what pleases you, and for longer at that which hurts you. Try to be faithful to your first impression. Don't believe in the 'unusual word'. Don't tire yourself out lying. Lies develop the imagination, and imagination is the ruin of the reporter.... Beware 'embellishments,' beware of obtrusive poetry."

"I found it set back from a road avoided by cars, and behind the most banal railings - railings suffocated with oleander, in a hurry to offer to passers-by through the bars, powdered bouquets of Provencal dust, white as flour, finer than pollen... Two hectares of vine, orange-trees, green figs, black figs - When I say that garlic, pimentos and aubergine abound between the vine-shoots and the furrows, have I not said everything? There is also a house - small, low - but of less account than its terrace covered with wisteria for example, or than its red-flamed begonia or the old thick-trunked mimosa, which, planted from the railings to the terrace, pays the house homage... do not ask me where I shall plant the white rose blown down by the wind, the yellow rose that smells of fine cigar, the pink rose that smells of rose, the continually dying red rose whose dry, light corpse still lavishes its balm of incense...
   —Colette describing her home in Saint-Tropez, "La Treille muscate."

"I'm surprised that I've changed, that I've grown old while I dreamed."
   —from "Les Vrilles de la vigne"

"To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play around a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word... To write is to sit and stare, hypnotized, at the reflection of the window in the silver inkstand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one's cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper... To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper... and to find the next day in place of the golden bough that bloomed so miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower. Oh to write!"

"Is this my last house? I take its pulse, I listen to it, while that brief interior night which follows the mid-day hour slips away. The cicadas and the new wattling which shades the terrace, creak and crackle. Some other insect crunches small chippings between the shell-like elytrons of its wings, the reddish bird in the pine tree calls every ten seconds, and the considerate west wind which circles my walls leaves in peace the flat dense sea, strong and rigidly blue, which will soften towards day's end. Is this my last house, the one which will find me faithful, the one I shall not abandon? It is such an ordinary house that it can know no rival. I can hear the clink of bottles being replenished for this evening's dinner. One wine, gooseberry pink, will accompany the green melon. The other, amber-coloured warm and gritty, goes with the salad, tomatoes, pimentos and onions steeped in oil, and with ripe fruits. After dinner we must not forget to irrigate the channels which surround the melons, and to water the garden balsam, the phlox, the dahlias and the young mandarin trees whose roots are not yet long enough to drink from the depths of the earth, nor have yet the strength to become verdant without help, under the constant heat of the sky. Young mandarin trees. Planted for whom? I don't know. Perhaps for me.
"In the ten o'clock night air, blue as convolvulus, the cats will snatch at moths, with vertical leaps. The two drowsy Japanese hens will chirp as in a nest, roosting against the arm of a garden chair. The dogs, already retired from the world, will be thinking of the approaching dawn, and I shall have the choice between book, bed, and the coast road lined with fluting toads. Have I recaptured here that which one never recaptures? Everything resembles the first years of my life, and I recognize little by little, in the confines of the rural home, in the cats, in the aged bitch, in the wonder, the serenity whose gentle breath I sense from afar - merciful refreshment, promise of healing rain hanging over my still storm life - I recognize the way back."

-----
"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest."
   —W. Somerset Maugham, from The Moon and Sixpence

"But the dead have been purified of all the faults that plague us and are loath to fetter the living."
   —Yourçenar, Dear Departed

"Every man is covered with stains of night."
   —Yourçenar, Dear Departed

"What I sought instinctively but only half-consciously was to prepare myself as the first reader, make sure I was well-oriented in every element I would require to enter and accompany the narrative toward its conclusion."
   —Peter Mathiessen, Paris Review interview

"Like birth, death is a sleep and a forgetting."
   —William. Osler, 1904, quoted in Sherwin Nuland's How We Die

"Time exists because we sink perpendicularly into death, with feet close together, dragged along by our millstones of flesh. But the images of our vampires and our angels float in this pure space where we plummet with vertiginous speed, without hope of return."
   —Marguerite Yourçenar

"In the waking state, men share a world in common, but asleep, each possesses a separate universe."
   —Heraclites

"What I do is entertain people. That's all Dickens ever did, or Robert Louis Stephenson. They got made into artists by subsequent generations, but at the time all they were saying was, 'Hey, do you want to hear a good story?'"
   —Michael Crichton

"I haven't learned anything. I'm writing a new book and really feel like [I'm] stumbling around blind. The only thing is I created a deeper reservoir of confidence. I can say: I've been here before -- don't give up. I've added to the evidence I have that when I stick to something I can make it work. And I think that's the most precious currency that writers have."
   —Mark Salzman

-----
   —from Max & Marjorie, the correspondence of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Max Perkins

"… The strenuous hunting season, the comings and goings of people, the activity of my grove work and orange picking, all combine to shatter the stillness and solitude I seem to need for the writing. Yet I have an idea that time is not actually wasted. Ideas gestate, and the very impatience I begin to feel after a time, is good for hard work."

"It is a temptation to damn Fitzgerald without sympathy, but I know how that state of mind creeps up on you and I have had to fight it myself. It comes usually when one's personal background is unstable or unsatisfying or both. Nothing, no work, takes the place of the right human contacts."

"I have to discard everything of 'The Yearling' - which we may call it for the time being - back to the first chapter. …My first thought had been to plunge into more or less exciting events. Then I realized that they were not exciting unless the boy, and his father, and his surroundings, were so real, so familiar, that the things that happened to him took on color because it all came so close to home, in its very familiarity. Just as the Louisville flood meant nothing to me until I found that the factory and beautiful home of my dearest friends were under water, and I was unable to contact them. The whole sweep of water and devastation became at once a true and unbearable thing. That is perhaps the whole secret of fiction. When the people written about move in reality before our eyes, touch us, then anything they do becomes vivid and important."

"The things all of you write me about 'The Yearling' and the Book of the Month Club choice make me very happy and very humble. The only reason I can accept it as even remotely deserved, is that I all but sweat blood in doing it. I do not see how any writer could work in greater agony and effort than I did on it, and this is strange to me, for no writer could ever have a clearer conception than I did of what I wanted to do and where I was going. But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined."

"My grove man who was shot is home from the hospital and recovering rapidly, and his wife (my house-girl) and the family are all so grateful for what little I was able to do for them, and they have all settled down to making life pleasant for me. …The old woman came marching out to my car with what seemed like belligerence. She was an immense but handsome and immaculate woman of the old-school type I thought no longer existed.
"She called, "That the white woman?" My girl said, "Yes." The old woman shouted, "I want to see her face." I thought I had done something that displeased her. She came to the car window and looked directly at me for some seconds. I said, "Good morning," and she made no answer. Finally she said slowly, "I want to look in the face of the white woman, got such sympathy for the black one." She nodded her head. She said, "I got you in my prayers. Say your name." I said, "Mrs. Rawlings," and she repeated it. She said, "When I take the case to the Lord, I want to carry your name natural." And she turned and marched away."

"It is impossible to work with the old lady in the house, for while she keeps saying, 'Now, I'm not going to bother you,' she can't resist interrupting me, usually to say something like, "Mrs. White made chili sauce and it was too sour, and now she has to take it all out of the jars and add sugar and cook it again and put it back.' Since I have heard each such news item several times before, the irritation is extreme. She is a very amusing old lady in many ways, especially because of her Malaprop-isms. She informed me that a certain old man had finally died, after lying for a week in a semi-comma. Having often lain myself for a week in a semi-comma, I was all sympathy. Just now she is reading The Grapes of Wrath, and she looked up from her book a few minutes ago to say, 'This is a wonderful book for anyone to read, that's moving.'"

-----
"The writer must not really know what it is that he is learning to know when he writes, which is more than the knowing of it."
   —Joy Williams, Ill Nature

-----
   —from The Journals of John Cheever

"This, then, is the thrill of writing, of playing on this team, the truly thrilling sense of this as an adventure; the hair, the grain of sand in one's mouth; the importance (but not at all a selfish one) of this exploration - the density of the rain forest, the shyness of the venomous serpents, the resounding conviction that one will, tomorrow, find the dugout and the paddle and the river that flows past the delta to the sea."

"Mr. Ross insisted on a degree of decorum. One could not, of course, use a word like 'fuck.' One complained, of course, and published stories elsewhere, but I, it seems, had my own sense of decorum, and when Mr. Ross used the word 'fuck' at the lunch table I would jump. Having noticed this, Mr. Ross would, at lunch, throw a 'fuck' in my direction now and then, to watch me jump. He was, himself, not a decorous man, but he taught me that decorum can be a mode of language - born of our need to speak with one another - and a language that, having been learned, was in no way constraining."

"We are all, sooner or later, shadows, but we are not overwhelmed."

"In Russia, in the 1860s or 1870s, one would have written, 'The tiny village of X, a hundred and twenty-seven versts from Moscow, was mentioned in the encyclopedia as the place where a landowner had successfully breeded a dog with a cat.' In France, a little earlier, one would have written, 'La peu que nous savons de la petite ville de B--, nous savons parce que lá se trouve un home á deux tetes.' In my own country, in the fifties and early sixties, one would have written, 'The little mill town of Pearl River was one of those small industrial communities that welcome the driver with a sign saying 'OLD IN TRADITION, YOUTHFUL IN GROWTH' and that are covered by a single zip code." Today we are, thank God, spared these euphemisms and can say succinctly, "The little village of Pearl River was an asshole."'

-----
''If one was fairly content, why in the name of God would one want to go through the discipline and scariness of sitting down to write 90,000 words?'' she asked. ''And one thing is the other. Writing makes you lonely because you have to exile yourself. But deeper than that is an inborn native loneliness, a spiritual void that words, for some reason, help fill.
"She added: ''I would say that every writer I have admired, like Faulkner, whom I love, and Joyce, or Emily Bronte, Sylvia Plath, Chekhov, Beckett, regardless of their particular daily history, has a loneliness and a depth of feeling that cannot be corresponded to, and that's why they write."
   —Edna O'Brien

-----
"…the darkness
is beyond us there is no explaining
the dark it is only the light
that we keep feeling a need to account for."
   —W.S. Merwin, from "The Marfa Lights"

"Where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god."
   —Joseph Campbell, "The Hero With a Thousand Faces"

"…all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear and a fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead."
   —Margaret Atwood, "Negotiating With the Dead"

"I think that all poets are sending religious messages because poetry is, in such great part, the comparison of one thing to another; or the saying, as in metaphor, that one thing is another. And to insist, as all poets do, that all things are related to each other, is to go toward making an assertion of the unity of all things."
   —Richard Wilbur, quoted in The New Yorker, November '04

"You are more and more authentic the more you look like someone you dreamed of being."
   —dialogue from Almodovar's "All About My Mother"

"No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us moving and makes us more divine than the others."
   —Martha Graham

"Plots are interesting, characters are fascinating, scenery can be totally enveloping, but the real art is the deep structure - the way the information is revealed and withheld so that the reader gets to find out things appropriately, or in a time frame that makes it an intimate experience."
   —Toni Morrison

"Character is plot."
   —Graham Greene

"I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story. But all this ends by being a plot."
   —Isak Dinesen

"One ceases to be a child when one realizes that telling one's troubles does not make things any better."
   —Cesare Pavese

"Sometimes it seems - this is profoundly untrue but anyway - sometimes it seems - as though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love, & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved."
   —Elizabeth Bishop, notebooks

"If you can say what you're unlikely to hear, if you can write what you're unlikely to read, you will have accomplished something."
   —Victor Hugo

"In 'The Domain of Arnheim' he [Poe] affirms the four basic conditions of happiness: life in the open air; the love of a woman; detachment from all ambition; and the creation of a new Beauty."
   —Baudelaire, "Edgar Poe: His Life and Works"

"A novel should be more interesting after three hundred pages than thirty."
   —John Irving

"Whoever believes in God can, and almost must, believe in the Devil; whoever prays to the saints and the angels has every chance of hearing infernal harmonics as well. Better still, nothing in human reason and logic prevents us from assuming that interferences, exchanges, could take place here and there between the solitary islands that we are and other, half-visible formations, willful impulses only partly personified, awakened, or established in us, capable of guiding us or of causing our destruction."
   —Marguerite Yourçenar, "How Many Years"

"And he never once in my hearing talked of talent. Serious writers almost never do, because they know, if they know anything, that talent is simply a Step 1 requirement, and many possess it who never amount to anything; and because talent is impossible to quantify; and because it only promises but doesn't usually deliver. What delivers - and Ray knew it, I know it, Tess knew it - was 'being at your station,' as Ray said: being there, present to do the work. And needless to say luck, too. Luck delivered."
   —Richard Ford on Raymond Carver, The New Yorker, October '98

"...not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight."
   —Eudora Welty

"Art is a lie that tells us the truth."
   —Pablo Picasso

"From his Columbian embassy in Puerto Principe, my old friend Anibal Noguera Mendoza [wrote me] …Moreover, in the first draft of the manuscript, he discovered half a dozen mortal fallacies and suicidal anachronisms that would have cast doubts on the execution of this novel.
"In this way we surprised in flagrante a soldier who won battles before he was born, a widow who went to Europe with her beloved husband, and an intimate luncheon for Bolivar and Sucre in Bogotá when one was in Caracas and the other in Quito."
   —Gabriel Garcia Marquez, acknowledgments at the end of The General in His Labyrinth

"The largest problem most young writers face is how to pursue a full-time but solitary job with no looming taskmasters in sight; most cases of writer's block, early or late, are the result of a failure to understand one's creative metabolism and how to maintain it, even-keeled, for long stretches of work in the absence of any greater goal."
   —Reynolds Price, Learning a Trade

"Easy reading is damned hard writing."
   —Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave."
   —Colette, "Rene Vivien"

"The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world."
   —Wallace Stevens

"People without hope don't write novels."
   —Flannery O'Connor

"In Florida, through sitting and gazing at Nature, I gradually learnt the way in which I should eventually find myself."
   —Frederick Delius, composer

"...for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
   —George Eliot, Middlemarch

"If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried."
   —Henry Taylor, poet

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."
   —H. G. Wells

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila."
   —Mitch Ratcliffe

"The only certainty about writing and trying to be a writer is that is has to be done, not dreamed of or planned and never written, or talked about (the ego eventually falls apart like a soaked sponge), but simply written; it's a dreadful, awful fact that writing is like any other work."
   —Janet Frame

"Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."
   —Francisco Goya

"Discipline is the refining fire by which talent becomes ability."
   —Roy L. Smith

"One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to."
   —Cynthia Ozick

"It was as if the novel was already written, floating in the air, on a network of electrons. I could hear it talking to itself. I sensed that if I would but sit and listen, it would come through, all ready."
   —A.S. Byatt

"All literature is about deviation from a certain norm."
   —Tatyana Tolstaya

"The walk is the important thing. I can sleep on a problem without finding a solution. But when I'm walking, an idea will come to me."
   —Naguib Mahfouz

"A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing - articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence."
   —Shirley Hazzard

"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."
   —Robert Louis Stevenson

"Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself."
   —Cicero

"I read not only for pleasure, but as a journeyman, and where I see a good effect I study it, and try to reproduce it."
   —Lawrence Durrell

"The creative power, which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book, quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape, keep one at it more than anything."
   —Virginia Woolf

"I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road."
   —Jean Cocteau

"If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place."
   —Rainer Maria Rilke

"I became an afternoon writer when I had afternoon. When I was able to write full-time, I used to spend the morning procrastinating and worrying, then plunge into the manuscript in a frenzy of anxiety around 3:00 PM when it looked as though I might not get anything done. …The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out? And so forth. I suspect most writers are like this."
   —Margaret Atwood

"I've spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary life intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now."
   —Anne Tyler

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, but others judge us by what we have already done."
   —Leo Tolstoy

"The loss of childhood is the beginning of poetry."
   —Andrei Tarkovski

"Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion and abide by that."
   —D. H. Lawrence

"Do not think of your faults; still less of others' faults; look for what is good and strong; and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes."
   —John Ruskin

"Most of my friends who are novelists have told me that they never know the ends of their novels when they start writing them; they find it peculiar that for my novels I need to know not just the ending, but every significant event in the main characters' lives. When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it; rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened. The invention is over by the time I begin. All I want to be thinking of is the language - the sentence I am writing, and the sentence that follows it. Just the language."
   —John Irving, from My Movie Business

"So much of a novelist's writing… takes place in the unconscious: in those depths that last word is written before the first word appears. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."
   —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

"When I think about my life, I behold again a few strolls besides the sea, a nude little girl in front of a mirror, some scattered gusts of pitiful music in a hotel corridor, a bed, a few trains whose speed crushed the countryside, Venice at dawn, Amsterdam beneath the rain, Constantinople at sunset, the lilacs of the rue de la Varenne, someone dying, roaming the halls of a clinic in a fur-lined cloak, the red box of a theatre, a young woman whose face turned all mauve because she was standing under a violet-colored lamp, the calcined hills of Greece, a field of daffodils in the countryside near Salzburg, a few dismal streets in the old northern towns where my sadness paced at set times before the shop fronts of corn chandlers or dealers in bootblacking, the grand basin of Versailles beneath a weighted sky of November, a camel stall filled with animals munching blood red melon, a parting near a subway entrance, a hand holding an anemone, the sweet sound of blood in beloved arteries, and these few dozen lightning flashes are what I call my memories. These fragments of actual events have the magic intensity of the visions glimpsed in my dreams; and conversely, certain visions in my dreams have all the weight of events that have been lived through. Only my reason prevents me from confounding the two orders of phenomena, but this same reason counsels me to perhaps reconcile them, to place them, one beside the other, on a plane which is doubtlessly that of the sole reality."
   —Marguerite Yourçenar, from Dreams and Destinies

"The process of delight has gotten a whole lot more reliable for me. The more I've realized that if a person's a born writer - and I think all good writers are born writers, were wired in some obviously permanent way for the deployment of language - if you're born a writer, you've got to learn the nature of your own creative metabolism and how to farm your gift literally in terms of the clock. How many days a week, what times of day, when not to answer the phone, when not to let Ed McMahon in the door with a four million dollar check."
   —Reynolds Price

"Instead of finishing a picture one square at a time, he kept all fluid, every detail dependent upon every other, and remained a poor man to the end of his life, because the more anxious he was to succeed, the more did his pictures sink through innumerable sittings into final confusion."
   —W. B. Yeats, writing of his father, J. B. Yeats

"A work of art is the social act of a solitary man."
   —J. B. Yeats

"A poet should feel quite free to