"Not the least of my many blessings is that we have only one neighbour. If you have to have neighbours at all, it is at leaset a mercy that there should be only one; for with people dropping in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how are you to get on with your life, I should like to know, and read your books, and dream your dreams to your satisfaction?"
— Elizabeth von Arnim (Elizabeth and Her German Garden)

"Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair."
— Elizabeth von Arnim (Elizabeth and Her German Garden)

"...and the summer seems as though it would dream on for ever."
— Elizabeth von Arnim

"Don't look at me in that tone of voice."
— Dorothy Parker

""This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.""
— Dorothy Parker

"I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true."
— Dorothy Parker

"And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word."
— Dorothy Parker

"A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden, or Life in the Woods)

"The wild roses were wide open and brilliant, the blue-eyed grass was in purple flower, and the silvery milkweed was just coming on."
— Willa Cather "Lost Lady"

"Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden, or Life in the Woods)

"I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it."
— Paul Harding (Tinkers)

"...I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and coloured me until back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world.... "
— Paul Harding (Tinkers)

"And that other world that you first dreamed of is always better if not real, because in it you have not jilted your lover, forsaken your child, or turned your back on your brother."
— Paul Harding "Tinkers"

"...I feel sorrow so deep it must be love..."
— Paul Harding "Tinkers"

""The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere."
"
— Annie Dillard "The Writing Life"

""The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.""
— Annie Dillard "The Writing Life"

""Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?""
— Annie Dillard "The Writing Life"

""People love pretty much the samethings best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.""
— Annie Dillard "The Writing Life"

"The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring."
— Annie Dilard "The Writing Life"

"At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it."
— Annie Dillard "The Writing Life"

"Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you."
— Annie Dillard "The Writing Life"

"It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them."
— Julian Barnes "Flaubert's Parrot"

"Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"Let the Stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson "Nature"

"The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own ends, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson "Nature"

""Oh Senor" said the niece. "Your grace should send them to be burned (books), just like all the rest, because it's very likely that my dear uncle, having been cured of the chivalric disease, will read these and want to become a shepherd and wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease.""
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra "Don Quixote"

"Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"You might have to apologize to Oprah.

What'd I do to her?

She's just---that's who you apologize to."
— Steve Hely "How I Became a Famous Novelist"

"He put the blinker on, pulled out onto the avenue. "Well, that was nice," she said, sitting back. They had fun together these days, they really did. It was as if marriage had been a long, complicatd meal, and now there was this lovely dessert."
— Elizabeth Strut "Olive Kittridge"

"What young people didn't know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn't choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered."
— Elizabeth Strout "Olive Kittridge"

"For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.

"
— Anne Lamott "Bird by Bird"

"There is ecstasy in paying attention."
— Anne Lamott "Bird by Bird"

"But a mother’s life with a teenager can sometimes resemble a movie starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford—though without wigs, or at least with different wigs, and with each of you taking turns in the wheelchair."
— Lorrie Moore interview with Paul Vidich on narrativemagazin.com