Tiah Beautement's Blog, page 99

On highways

‘Blue lips to count blue cars,’ I whisper, pressing my finger to her mouth to steal an ice-cream kiss. Her kiss is a memory of the time we lifted a Cornetto from Joe Saviour’s fridge and lay on the grassed embankment above the highway, counting cars with stolen sugar on our tongues. Zooming-zooming streaks of red, zooming-zooming streaks of blue. Our greedy eyes gobbled the white stripes. We used to believe that the highway went somewhere, that over the horizon was escape, places we’d never been and thought we wanted to go. - Rachel Zadok, Sister-Sister

On stranger than fiction

And what I have discovered is that the parts of my work that people most tell me are “unbelievable” are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination. Perhaps it is because of the relatively recent convention we bring to reading stories, where stories come labelled either as fiction or as nonfiction. - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Truth is no stranger to fiction

On leaving

I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility. - Jack Kerouac, On the Road

On change

I am old, Gandalf. I don't look it, but I am beginning to feel it in my heart of hearts. Well-preserved indeed! Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something. - JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

On literally

Don’t use the word “literally” when you really mean “figuratively”. It literally makes me want to stab you a little but I don’t do it because that’s illegal and also because I have a very limited amount of knives. - The bloggess, Rules for life

On fiction's purpose

Reading fiction creates empathy. It makes the reader a better person, more tolerant, able to understand the world and the people they share it with better. Because, unlike film or TV, reading asks the reader to participate actively, to create characters and landscapes and all the emotions that go with it in their imagination. The purpose of other fictive media is to simultaneously entertain and educate, but the experience is far more passive. - Rachel Zadok, Author's notes

On creativity

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. - Kurt Vonnegut

She will be missed

Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? I have heard You calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if You lead me. I will hold your people in my heart. - Daniel L. Schutte, Here I Am Lord In Memory of a beautiful lady - 11 August, 1950 - 2 May, 2013

On words

I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary’s next page. And the same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary’s A section had filled a whole tablet — and I went on into the B’s. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed. Between what I wrote in my tablet, and...

On words

No writer presumably wishes to impose his own miserable character, his own private secrets and vices upon the reader. But has any writer, who is not a typewriter, succeeded in being wholly impersonal? Always, inevitably, we know them as well as their books. Such is the suggestive power of words that they will often make a bad book into a very lovable human being, and a good book into a man whom we can hardly tolerate in the room. - passage taken from the only surviving recording of Virgina Woolf's voice, 1937