Ian Pisarcik > Ian's Quotes

“The Meadow... Only one of them succeeded in making a life here... He weathered. Before a backdrop of natural beauty, he lived a life from which everything was taken but a place. He lived so close to the real world it almost let him in.”
― James Galvin, The Meadow

“In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories

“I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.”
― Richard Yates

“After a year of therapy, my psychiatrist said to me, "Maybe life isn't for everyone.”
― Larry Brown

“Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“Clouds aren't as pretty as they used to be. That's a known fact. ”
― Joy Williams

“All the complex wires of life were stripped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time.”
― Annie Proulx

“The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.”
― Barry Hannah

“I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing- a sunset or an old shoe- in absolute and simple amazement.”
― Raymond Carver, Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories

“It don't do you no nevermind to tell nobody nothing.”
― Thomas McGuane

“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“If you want to write, you've got to shut yourself up in a room and write.”
― Larry Brown, Big Bad Love

“Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.”
― Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

“The American Conversation is an argument, after all, and way worse than our fear of error or anarchy or Gomorrahl decadence is our fear of theocracy or autocracy or any ideology whose project is not to argue or persuade but to adjourn the whole debate sine die. It's this logic (and perhaps this alone) that keeps protofascism or royalism or Maoism or any sort of really dire extremism from achieving mainstream legitimacy in US politics”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“Don't be scared of your hunger. If you're scared of your hunger, you'll just be one more ninny like everyone else.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Words have weight.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Let me say it again: You must not come lightly to the blank page.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.”
― Harry Crews

“Men were doomed to repeat the sins of not only their fathers, but all their ancient forbears on back to Cain. That was the true mark upon man, scripted in his very blood.”
― Charles Dodd White, Lambs of Men

“The town of North Falls consisted of twenty-eight square miles positioned on a high plateau in the southern region of the Green Mountain range. It had the highest altitude of any village in the state, which meant the snow came early and it came often. It also meant that the first thing anybody noticed about the town was the church steeple. The rotting whitewashed wood and the slatted oval window and the copper spire all connected to the simple wood framing. It was the highest point in the state, and people liked to say that it was closer to God than anywhere else in Vermont. Not that it did the town much good.”
― Ian Pisarcik, Before Familiar Woods

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“We own nothing in our lives but perspective.”
― Mark Spragg, The Fruit of Stone

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”
― Jim Harrison

“If it's wild to your own heart, protect it. Preserve it. Love it. And fight for it, and dedicate yourself to it, whether it's a mountain range, your wife, your husband, or even (god forbid) your job. It doesn't matter if it's wild to anyone else: if it's what makes your heart sing, if it's what makes your days soar like a hawk in the summertime, then focus on it. Because for sure, it's wild, and if it's wild, it'll mean you're still free. No matter where you are.”
― Rick Bass