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#1

“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

710 likes

#2

“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: castle, description, gothic, owl, purple, ruin, tower

132 likes

#3

“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, science-fiction, self-referential

61 likes

#4

“The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking”
― Marvin Bell, Mars Being Red

tags: iraq, line, motivation, poetry, politics, prodigal, war

41 likes

#5

“I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

tags: aubrey, friendship, maturin, surgery

74 likes

#6

“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas

tags: books, literature

194 likes

#7

“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

2052 likes

#8

“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, on-fiction, talent, value, vocation, writing

78 likes

#9

“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

32 likes

#10

“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-voice, politics, villainy

26 likes

#11

“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

297 likes

#12

“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, Master & Commander

tags: jingoism, maturin, nationalism, nationality, patriotism, stephen-maturin

221 likes

#13

“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

35 likes

#14

“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

7 likes

#15

“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

17 likes

#16

“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

5 likes

#17

“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

310 likes

#18

“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

7 likes

#19

“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

169 likes

#20

“Trees're always a relief, after people.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

tags: alienation, forest, humanity, nature, trees

211 likes

#21

“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

539 likes

#22

“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

47 likes

#23

“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

31 likes

#24

“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

17 likes

#25

“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: honesty, insanity, mental-health, psychiatrist, sanity

27 likes

#26

“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

34 likes

#27

“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, The Blind Assassin

tags: archetype, childhood, motherhood, projection, psychology

171 likes

#28

“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

921 likes

#29

“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 love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: foresight, knowledge, women

1596 likes

#30

“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, The Blind Assassin

tags: action, decision, dream, free-will

94 likes

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