“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Clara Rilke
"But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come." ~from THE CALL OF THE WILD (1903) by John Griffith
"Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography." ~from "The Critic as Artist" (1891)
“How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.”
―from "The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections" by V. S. Naipaul
“I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.” ~from LIVING TO TELL THE TALE by Gabriel García Márquez
“I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.” ~from THE CHOSEN by Chaim Potok
“I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another―desire, by another name―is the source of almost every sorrow.” ~Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs
“I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.” ~Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories
“I learned a lot from the stories my uncle, aunts and grandparents told me: that no one is perfect but most people are good; that people can’t be judged by their worst or weakest moments; that harsh judgments can make hypocrites of us all; that a lot of life is just showing up and hanging on; that laughter is often the best, and sometimes the only response to pain........... Perhaps most important, I learned that everyone has a story – of dreams and nightmares, hope and heartache, love and loss, courage and fear, sacrifice and selfishness. All my life I’ve been interested in other people’s stories. I wanted to know them, understand them, feel them. When I grew up into politics, I always felt the main point of my work was to give people a chance to have better stories." ~President Bill Clinton, My Life
“I wonder why trying to transcend time never even succeeds in stopping it...” ~Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman
“If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives.” ~from "The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales" by Bruno Bettelheim
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.” ~Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.” ~Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go from Vintage & Anchor Books
"No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be." ~Jonathan Harker from DRACULA by Bram Stoker
"Once you let people know anything about what you think, that's it, you're dead. Then they'll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons." ~Helen Oyeyemi, author of THE ICARUS GIRL
"One cannot be taught to write. One can only learn to write by writing—and reading. Reading good books written by real artists—until you understand why they are good.” ~Truman Capote from a letter to Alvin Dewey III (25 May 1964) included in TOO BRIEF A TREAT: The Letters of Truman Capote By Truman Capote
"People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.” ~from AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner from Vintage Books
"Politicians come to judge themselves, and be judged, by whether they deliver the pork; whether they offered grants rather than their own best judgment and wisdom; whether their decision was in the immediate interest of their district or city rather them the long-term interest if the nation." ~from THE STREETS WERE PAVED WITH GOLD (1979) by Ken Auletta
“Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.” ~M. F. K. Fisher
“The person who knew you best when you were seventeen will always have a claim on you, no matter how much you change. There's something seductive and magnetic about it, the feeling of being understood like that. I suppose it goes both ways.” ~Lauren Fox, Friends Like Us
“The right ending is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.” ~from COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER by Michael Ondaatje
“The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that by seeing nothing it might avoid Truth. ” ~Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
"There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real." ~James Salter, All That Is, from Vintage & Anchor Books
"There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do that." ~from "The Bohemian Girl" (1912) by Willa Cather
“Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.” ~Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's
"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” ~W. Somerset Maugham
"We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time." ~Zadie Smith, White Teeth
“We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reason. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.” ~from THE DRUNKARD'S WALK: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow
“We breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work and then die! The end of life is death. What do you long for? Love? A few kisses and you will be powerless. Money? What for? To gratify your desires. Glory? What coems after it all? Death! Death alone is certain.” ~from BEL AMI by Guy de Maupassant
"We tend to suffer from the illusion that we are capable of dying for a belief or theory. What Hagakure is insisting is that even in merciless death, a futile death that knows neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being. If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death? No death may be called futile." ~Yukio Mishima on Hagakure : The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan (1977)
"When you admire a writer you become curious. You look for his secret. The clues to his puzzle." ~from Philip Roth's THE GHOST WRITER (Vintage Books and Anchor Books)
"Wilde had to live his life twice over, first in slow motion, then at top speed. During the first period he was a scapegrace, during the second a scapegoat." ~from OSCAR WILDE by Richard Ellmann
“Writing is the painting of the voice; the closer the resemblance, the better it is” ~Voltaire
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