Light the Dark Quotes

“Sometimes, it’s just the feeling that a book has enlarged you somehow, providing you not so much with answers as with better, clearer questions.”
― Joe Fassler, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

“[On Thornton Wilder's Our Town] "I can't look at everything hard enough": The tragedy is that, while we're alive, we don't view our days in the knowledge that all things must pass. We don't--we can't--value our lives, our loved ones, with the urgent knowledge that they'll one day be gone forever. Emily notices with despair that she and her mother barely look at one another, and she laments our self-possession, our distractedness, the million things that keep us from each other. "Oh, Mama," she cries, "just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. . . . Let's look at one another." But other and daughter remain self-absorbed, each in a private sea of her own thoughts, and that moment of recognition, of connection, never comes. Eventually, Emily has to turn away.”
― Joe Fassler, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

“The Civil War was a big break in Whitman’s poetry. Sometimes, he’d drive you nuts before that with his oh, what a great country we are, marching toward this glorious future!—all that Emersonian optimism. He saw this vision of collective humanity in this country that he really believed in. He expected all good things would happen from this very energetic and attractive people. And then, boom—the war.”
― Joe Fassler, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

“One by one, he lifts the blankets to take a peek. Curious I halt and silent stand, Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket; Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes? Who are you my dear comrade? Then to the second I step—and who are you my child and darling? Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming? Whitman had compassion. He understood these were unique lives that had been extinguished, three examples among countless others. Empathy is one of the strongest things in Whitman from the very beginning. And as I read this, I really feel sorry for that old man. And of course, for the kid—young guy, who goes to war to be a hero and gets killed. The whole poem is a live wire vibrating with feelings. It manages to be both restrained and emotional as the speaker uncovers those bodies and looks in horror at their faces.”
― Joe Fassler, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

“Whenever you put yourself in the public eye you’re going to be looked at, and people are going to make judgments about you, and they’re not all going to be positive. If you care what people think, you’ll do what I used to do: hide. We’re now in a societal phase where caring what people think is just a way to completely lose your mind. So I don’t do that. You put those people out of your mind. It’s not possible to care what people think and do what I do.”
― Joe Fassler, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

“Carson’s mode of self-awareness doesn’t apologize for its emotion. She simply acknowledges that, whenever we feel, we do so in a way that anticipates the gaze of others—as well as anticipates the empathy or lack of empathy we’ll encounter there. I feel some version of this happening when she writes: When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die. This is not uncommon.”
― Joe Fassler, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

“Pero of course it is, mijita. All your life is a work of art. A painting is not a painting but the way you live each day. A song is not a song but the words you share with the people you love. A book is not a book but the choices you make every day trying to be a decent person.”
― Joe Fassler, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

“Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. So it begins with an admission of how devastating the world is, how unfair and how sad. He goes on to say what he’s seen from a life of watching very carefully: women at the fountain in a famine-stricken town, “laughing together between / the suffering they have known and the awfulness / in their future.” He describes the “terrible streets” of Calcutta, caged prostitutes in Bombay laughing. So there’s this human capacity for joy and endurance, even when things are at their worst. A joy that occurs not despite our suffering, but within it.”
― Joe Fassler, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

“Joy Harjo, who’s a Creek Indian poet and a jazz musician, was once asked by a white reporter why she played the saxophone, since it’s not an Indian instrument. And she said: “It is when I play it.” If “I’m in the reservation of my mind” is the question, then “It is when I play it” is the answer. It’s an internal condition, and we spend too much time defining ourselves by the external. There is always this implication that in order to be Indian you must be from the reservation. It’s not true and it’s a notion that limits us—it forces us to define our entire life experiences in terms of how they do or do not relate to the reservation.”
― Joe Fassler, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process