SmarterLilac > SmarterLilac's Quotes

“Three failures denote uncommon strength. A weakling has not enough grit to fail thrice.”
― Minna Thomas Antrim

“Some of my best friends are illusions. Been sustaining me for years.”
― Sheila Ballantyne

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
― Nikki Giovanni

“I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, 'I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.' And I looked at him and said, 'You haven't.' You know, Here's the good news and the bad news: you haven't! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it's not me; you don’t live with me; you're not intimate with me. You're not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I'm making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it's the box you look into; it's not the man or the woman. It's alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that's different from 'Here is what happened to me when I was ten.”
― Marie Howe

“A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader's eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.”
― Bill Barich

“There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment in history or nothing happens.”
― Coretta Scott King

“You can always trust information given to you by people who are crazy. They have access to truth not available through regular channels.”
― Sheila Ballantyne

“Every day, give yourself a good mental shampoo.”
― Sara Jordan

“I write letters to my right brain all the time. They're just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.”
― Sue Grafton

“There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.”
― Adrienne Rich

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.”
― Carolyn Kizer

“I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.”
― Alice Hoffman

“The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.”
― Denise Levertov

“I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point--race. Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.”
― Molly Ivins

“Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.”
― Donald Hall

“My mother used to say, when the time is right, you don't need to have a committee meeting about it.”
― Richard Bausch

“Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for.”
― Molly Ivins

“I can't help thinking of Jackson Pollock, who poured, splattered and lashed the canvass with strings of paint. His process was about snaring not only a vision, but the moment the vision occurred to him. The paint becomes a net cast around something too fast to be caught. The bare spaces between the net's strands are as significant as the strands themselves because they hint at what can't be painted, can't be described.”
― Jocelyn Lieu

“We are writing in the age of stylish minimalism that in truth has become even more cautious because of word processing. Nowadays, creative writing students are underwriting rather than overdoing it.”
― Stephen Kuusisto

“Genuineness is often sacrificed in order to showcase the author's control over the form and subject matter, the end result technically sound but emotionally cold.”
― Jennifer S. Davis

“Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire to luminous chaos. Loving the power of grammar and the fine distinctions of language, I seek the part of the mind I didn't know was there, the part 'sheer,' 'no-manfathomed,' 'cliffs of fall.”
― Janet Burroway

“...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Hear me now or regret it later: Everything you write must be read aloud. Once all the context items are in place, this is the final test for any written piece...

Do not neglect your sense of hearing in the process of writing and reading. As a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, I can tell you on good authority that you have been listening to the English language at least five or six years longer than you have been writing and reading. And, most probably, your ears also had eighteen or more years of familiarity with the language before you began to read or write with a writer's sensibility. For these reasons, your ears know when things sound okay, good, beautiful, strange, awkward, or just plain bad, before your eye can pick up on such things...

Your written voice should burn with the fire of fervent prayer, soothe like a friend's voice during a late-night phone call, alure like a lover's whisper. You must, through your accessible, infinitely read-aloudable voice, make your audience into an insatiable reader of your words.”
― Jiro Adachi

“There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It's a kind of trick of the mind and he is born with it.
”
― Morley Callaghan

“Men who shared the load at home seemed just as pressed for time as their wives, and torn between the demands of career and small children...But the majority of men did not share the load at home. Some refused outright. Others refused more passively, often offering a loving shoulder to lean on, an understanding ear as their working wife faced the conflict they both saw as hers.”
― Arlie Hochschild

“Insofar as men gain time, ease, independence, or liberty from women's domestic labors, they lack incentive to change.”
― Linda P. Rouse

“Society will not crumble if men take a turn at the dishes.”
― Linda P. Rouse

“I love being single. It's almost like being rich.”
― Sue Grafton