Billy Chitwood > Billy's Quotes

“So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.”
― Harold Acton

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored.”
― Patricia A. McKillip

“The truly free man is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.”
― Jules Renard, The Journal of Jules Renard

“My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.”
― William Golding

“I ate some emotional soup in my childhood and have spent a lifetime trying to digest it.”
― Billy Ray Chitwood, The Cracked Mirror: Reflections of an Appalachian Son

“Travel is little beds and cramped bathrooms. It’s old television sets and slow Internet connections. Travel is extraordinary conversations with ordinary people. It’s waiters, gas station attendants, and housekeepers becoming the most interesting people in the world. It’s churches that are compelling enough to enter. It’s McDonald’s being a luxury. It’s the realization that you may have been born in the wrong country. Travel is a smile that leads to a conversation in broken English. It’s the epiphany that pretty girls smile the same way all over the world. Travel is tipping 10% and being embraced for it. Travel is the same white T-shirt again tomorrow. Travel is accented sex after good wine and too many unfiltered cigarettes. Travel is flowing in the back of a bus with giggly strangers. It’s a street full of bearded backpackers looking down at maps. Travel is wishing for one more bite of whatever that just was. It’s the rediscovery of walking somewhere. It’s sharing a bottle of liquor on an overnight train with a new friend. Travel is “Maybe I don’t have to do it that way when I get back home.” It’s nostalgia for studying abroad that one semester. Travel is realizing that “age thirty” should be shed of its goddamn stigma.”
― Nick Miller

“My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.”
― André Breton, What Is Surrealism?: Selected Writings

“When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I’ll have a book.”
― Betsy Byars, The Moon and I

“Perfect is a dream that you wake up from and spend forever trying to remember.”
― Joseph Eastwood

“There is something deep deceptive in the reality.”
― Alexandar Tomov

“There is something inherently deceptive about reality.”
― Alexandar Tomov

“I don't correct her to let her know her backdoor wisdom yanks me deep into another country, where water runs uphill.”
― Justin Bog, Sandcastle and Other Stories: The Complete Edition

“Now, a month later, I sit, foggy, a similar state of mind, in a different seafood restaurant with a locals-know-every-secret bar, two happy hour martinis downed, fidgeting with my napkin below the lip of the table, and I barely hear Wendy ask me another question. She brought a bag of them tonight.”
― Justin Bog, The Conversationalist

“The woman with the cat complex is named Mrs. Alice Plesher, but she doesn't reveal her first name to him and Sai only finds out by accident, later. Mrs. Plesher calls the paper and is put through to Sai. He has no idea why although he could guess the new guy gets all of the reporter-on-the-beat drudgery assignments until proven worthy. Alice speaks haltingly as if hardened by age and her voice reveals a rasp. Sai pictures her in a long house dress from the fifties, wide pink and white stripes fading with age---a smock of beige over the dress, a multitude of cats clinging to the fabric like stick-ons.”
― Justin Bog, A Great Distance

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin