June 2010
“There is nothing that you cannot be, do, or have.”
—Ask and it is given
“Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read and what I haven’t read.”
— Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts) (via teachingliteracy)
“A word after a word after a word is power.”
— Margaret Atwood (via teachingliteracy)
“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.”
— Joyce Carol Oates (via teachingliteracy)
EYES FOR THE FUTURE
I’m on a mission to erase myself of my past. From here on, I only have eyes for the future.
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
—To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (via awritersruminations)
“We do not need men like Proust and Joyce; men like this are a luxury, an added fillip that an abundant culture can produce only after the more basic literary need has been filled. This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic…. Whatever the many failings of my work, let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born.”
—A 19-year-old John Updike, writing to his parents. (via schenkenberg) (via awritersruminations)
“God is absence. God is the solitude of man.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre (via smut-to-go)
“It’s 4 AM in your soul, “last call” at the bar of salvation, and you’re in the mood for one more drink.”
—Evan Schlansky, on what listening to Visions of Johanna feels like (via whokilled) (via smut-to-go)
“Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.”
—Françoise Sagan (via smut-to-go)
