Felicity's quotes

(showing 1-43 of 43)

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

tags: art, craft, fiction, reading, writing
90 people liked it

"This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow."
— Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan)

tags: description, purple, ruin
8 people liked it

"And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile — except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison.'"
— Isaac Asimov (Murder at the ABA)

tags: autograph, convention, fame, fiction, science, self-referential
8 people liked it

"The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking"
— Marvin Bell (Mars Being Red)

tags: iraq, line, motivation, poetry, politics, prodigal, war
4 people liked it

"I sew his ears on from time to time, sure."
— Patrick O'Brian (Post Captain)

tags: aubrey, friendship, maturin, surgery
13 people liked it

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

tags: books, literature
15 people liked it

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor

tags: criticism, humor, writing
361 people liked it

"There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

tags: art, fiction, talent, value, vocation, writing
7 people liked it

"The fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees."
— Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio)

tags: description, disappointment, ohio, rain, seasons, subtle, weather
4 people liked it

"There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel."
— Charles Baxter (Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction)

tags: character, deniability, mistakes, passive, politics, villainy, voice
6 people liked it

"When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story."
— Charles Baxter (Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction)

tags: destiny, discovery, fiction, mystery, overdetermination, perfection, plot, writing
12 people liked it

"But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile."
— Patrick O'Brian

tags: jingoism, maturin, nationalism, nationality, patriotism, stephen
11 people liked it

"I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals."
— Margaret Atwood (The Tent)

tags: allegory, animals, fable, humans, parable
6 people liked it

"'For the people of my country,' Renato said, 'water is everything: love, life, religion...even God.'

'It is like that for me too,' I said. 'In English we call that a metaphor.'

'Of course,' said Renato, 'and water is the most abundant metaphor on earth.'"
— Pam Houston (Waltzing the Cat)

tags: life, malapropism, metaphor, water
1 person liked it

"'Do you write novels?' I said.
'Novels, Lord no,' she said. 'I can't even stay married.'"
— Pam Houston (Waltzing the Cat)

tags: art, commitment, humor, writing
3 people liked it

"The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn't be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn't yet shown up."
— Pam Houston (Waltzing the Cat)

tags: change, fear, growth, inertia, self-invention
1 person liked it

"'But it isn't easy,' said Pooh. 'Because Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.'"
— A. A. Milne (The House at Pooh Corner)

14 people liked it

"The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think."
— Charles Baxter (Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction)

tags: anthropomorphization, consensual-reality, pathetic-fallacy, sanity, writing
2 people liked it

"All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

tags: gender, misandry, misogyny, sexism
1 person liked it

"Trees're always a relief, after people."
— David Mitchell (Black Swan Green: A Novel)

tags: alienation, forest, humanity, nature, trees
6 people liked it

"I give you this to take with you:
Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can
begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting."
— Judith Minty (Letters to My Daughters)

tags: change, leaving, moving, poetry, rebirth, time
7 people liked it

"It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext."
— Leslie What (Crazy Love)

tags: funny, hermit, literature, simile, wilderness
5 people liked it

"Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one."
— P.D. James (Original Sin)

tags: life, mask, mystery, psychology, secret
2 people liked it

"Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

tags: abstract, concrete, humor, reality
2 people liked it

"Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

tags: health, honesty, insanity, mental, psychiatrist, sanity
3 people liked it

"It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed."
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

tags: forgiveness, grudge, human-nature
3 people liked it

"What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

tags: archetype, childhood, motherhood, projection, psychology
5 people liked it

"Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow."
— Margaret Atwood

tags: writing
113 people liked it

"If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next -- if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions -- you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning.
You'd never dare to."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

tags: women
87 people liked it

"Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

tags: action, decision, dream, free, will
9 people liked it

"In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

tags: conflict, story, unhappiness
11 people liked it

"The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

tags: death, haunting, madness, regret
6 people liked it

"I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

tags: enlightenment, humor, self-awareness, spirituality
4 people liked it

"He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

tags: alienation, callousness, dehumanization
4 people liked it

"Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

tags: attention, hearing, inattention, listening, senses
2 people liked it

"'I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all.'"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

tags: acquaintance, contradiction, humor
2 people liked it

"These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything."
— Walter Mosley (The Best American Short Stories 2003)

tags: fiction, reading, short, story, understanding
2 people liked it

"In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (Lavinia)

tags: fear, helplessness, loss, religion
2 people liked it

"A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them."
— William Edgar Stafford

tags: discovery, poetry, thinking, writing
1 person liked it

"Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up."
— Alan Bennett (The Uncommon Reader: A Novella)

tags: books, briefing, entertainment, expansion, information, learning, reading
1 person liked it

"To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

tags: ambiguity, certainty, humility, knowledge, policy
4 people liked it

"Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

tags: civiilization, peace, primitiveness, society, war
1 person liked it

"Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another."
— Iain M. Banks (The Player of Games)

tags: isolation, safety, story, technology, trope
2 people liked it

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