Ned Hayes's Blog, page 111
April 2, 2014
sinfulfolk:
Sinful Folk illustrator Nikki McClure's painstaking...
Sinful Folk illustrator Nikki McClure's painstaking papercut process.
Love her artwork, and her fabulous cover for Sinful Folk!
PHOTO: gathrnomoss: Papercut by Nikki McClure by LSO - The Mark Olympia on Flickr.
April 1, 2014
"April comes to us, with her showers sweet. I wake to the cries...
"April comes to us, with her showers sweet. I wake to the cries of little birds before the light comes across the heath. They wait all night with open eyes. Now, with the rain at dawn, their voices make melody." I imagine my mother calling to me, her words echoing across the years. Every night, I slip into the empty winter land of memory."
— from the novel Sinful Folk, by Ned Hayes
"It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it."
- Kenzaburo Oe, Japanese novelist, at a symposium of Nobel Laureates in Atlanta, as quoted by Mary Ruefle in Madness, Rack, and Honey (via mythologyofblue)
"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of...
"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." — Jorge Luis Borges
"I have also imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."...
"I have also imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." — Jorge Luis Borges
March 30, 2014
Also, my birthday! (SinfulFolk.com /...
Also, my birthday! (SinfulFolk.com / NedNote.com)
Literary Birthday - 31 March
Happy Birthday, John Fowles, born 31 March 1926, died 5 November 2005
Top 12 John Fowles Quotes
There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
I think all the arts draw on a nostalgia or longing for a better world—at root a better metaphysical condition—than the one that is. Self-destructive, I don’t know, but certainly we are all victims of some form of manic depression. That is the price of being what we are. I would never choose—even if I could!—to be a more “normal” human being; I would never choose something without that emotional cost, severe though it can become.
Writing novels is a time-consuming, psyche-consuming business. I mean I don’t think a good teacher actually would be likely to write good novels.
What interests me about novelists as a species is the obsessiveness of the activity, the fact that novelists have to go on writing. I think that probably must come from a sense of the irrecoverable. In every novelist’s life there is some more acute sense of loss than with other people, and I suppose I must have felt that. I didn’t realize it, I suppose, till the last ten or fifteen years. In fact you have to write novels to begin to understand this. There’s a kind of backwardness in the novel…an attempt to get back to a lost world.
If a novelist isn’t in exile I suspect he’d be in trouble.Fowles was an English novelist influenced by both Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. He is best known for The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles was named by The Times newspaper as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Source for Image
by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write
"The sound of a distant ocean covers me with surf, that tide...
"The sound of a distant ocean covers me with surf, that tide that bears me back eternally into the past, back to the place where I was born. My mother took me out in our little fishing boat, out on the open water of the sea. The thrum and hiss of surf upon the shore behind us, the breaking rhythm never ceasing. My mother waited until we were out of sight of land….. People come through the whiteness, through the bright light, but all of them are ghosts."
March 29, 2014
"Stars steam away as a pale sun rises, hot coal dropped in a...
"Stars steam away as a pale sun rises, hot coal dropped in a watery sky. Light seeps across the forest as the reedy shrieks of wood fowl echo in the trees. The path from our village to the King’s Highway is a crooked line of mud rutted with cart tracks, a rough trough where the dirty snow is stabbed through by the hooves of feral sheep. To the east, that faint track leads up through the forest until it reaches, finally, the open country."
