Julia Scheeres > Julia's Quotes

“At the Moor

Wanderer in the black wind; quietly the dry reeds whisper
In the stillness of the moor. In the gray sky
A flock of wild birds follows;
Slanting over gloomy waters.

Turmoil. In decayed hut
The spirit of putrescence flutters with black wings.
Crippled birches in the autumn wind.

Evening in deserted tavern. The way home is scented all around
By the soft gloom of grazing herds;
Apparition of the night; toads plunge from brown waters.”
― Georg Trakl

“But this is also one of the most compelling elements in travel, the feeling of dread underneath everything, it makes sensations heightened and acute, the world is charged with a power it doesn’t have in ordinary life.”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you’re moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border is a line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere.”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“The dialogue and the gestures are tinny and false, like some kind of bright paper wrapped around the meaning of the moment.”
― Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

“That line from the Iliad, “Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.”
― Francisco Goldman, Monkey Boy: A Novel

“Nothing is going to hasten the end of a livable planet faster than the rise of the far right.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“I’ve always hated the way the most powerful experiences so often end up resembling dreams.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“imagination would become memory:”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“Turn then to Virginia Woolf, who said that putting feelings into words takes the pain away. Making a scene come right, making a character come together: there was no greater pleasure, she said.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever. Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge

“I have come to believe that writing is an endless, shifting negotiation between intention and discovery, ideas brought to the page and ones uncovered in the process of writing itself, music and truth.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Story of a Poem

“Sometimes I know what I want to say. Almost always, I can only really discover what I think and believe through the process of writing the poem. I have to let myself be ok with both states, and to shift freely between them. I have to let myself make mistakes, be foolish and wrong, to write things down that make no sense but seem beautiful or funny or weird, and then use my intuition to guide me to what feels truthful to me.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Story of a Poem