Shelley > Shelley's Quotes

“Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life: The Classic Essay Collection on the Creative Process

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
― Simone Weil

“The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that swear of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.”
― Dorothy Allison

“The important of the beginning is to make possible the love affair; the importance of the ending is to make impossible the love affair.”
― Jenny Boully, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“When they invented the car they invented the collision and the darkness of what time leads the willing body to do.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

“There is really no difference between memory and sight, fantasy and actual vision. Vision is made of subtle fragmented movements of the eye. These fragmented pieces of the world are turned and pressed into memory before they can register in the brain. Fantasized images are actually made up of millions of disjointed observations collected and collated into the forms and textures of thought.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

“You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

“We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“In New Orleans—if you could get to New Orleans—would the music be loud enough?”
― Annie Dillard, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“Society places the writer so far beyond the pale that society does not regard the writer at all.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life: The Classic Essay Collection on the Creative Process

“What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“When I came home in the middle of the night I was tired; I longed for a tolerant giant, a person as big as a house, to hold me and rock me.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life: The Classic Essay Collection on the Creative Process