El > El's Quotes

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“But the best part of catching Neil in the shower was, hands down, the loud, awful singing.”
― Abigail Barnette, The Boss

“All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”
― Jean Rhys

“We listen to NPR for the first two hours on the road, the strange comfort of bad news reported in reasonable tones,”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“It was in the summer that one really lived. Then all the little overcrowded houses were opened wide, and the wind blew through them with sweet, earthy smells of garden-planting. The town looked as if it had just been washed. People were out painting their fences. The cottonwood trees were a-flicker with sticky, yellow little leaves, and the feathery tamarisks were in pink bud. With the warm weather came freedom for everybody. People were dug up, as it were. The very old people, whom one had not seen all winter, came out and sunned themselves in the yard. The double windows were taken off the houses, the tormenting flannels in which children had been encased all winter were put away in boxes, and the youngsters felt a pleasure in the cool cotton things next their skin.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen. Only when a paragraph’s role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work’s ends.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“We were all standing there waiting on the photographer,” my father told me later on the phone. “And Mike said, ‘You know what she’s doing, don’t you? She’s going to wait until the three of us are dead and then she’s going to write about us. This is the picture that will run with the piece.’” My father said the idea hadn’t occurred to him, and it wouldn’t have occurred to Darrell, but as soon as Mike said it, they knew he was right. He was right. That was exactly what I meant to do. That is exactly what I’m doing now.”
― Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays

“This was the practice: I was starting to get rid of my possessions, at least the useless ones, because possessions stood between me and death. They didn’t protect me from death, but they created a barrier in my understanding, like many layers of bubble wrap, so that instead of thinking about what was coming and the beauty that was here now, I was thinking about the piles of shiny trinkets I’d accumulated. I had begun the journey of digging out.”
― Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays

“In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. –JOHN CAGE1”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“I thought of the way mother cats carried their kittens by biting their napes and swinging them around, and I wanted to know what my teeth would do to that tender estate.”
― K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want: Stories

“They say that 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people.' Well I think the gun helps. If you just stood there and yelled BANG, I don't think you'd kill too many people.”
― Eddie Izzard

“Just why Mr. Frodo was selling his beautiful hole was even more debatable than the price.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays