191 quotes found
“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects a...”
“I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out.”
“For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?”
“There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writers estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling th...”
“Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.”
“So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.”
“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As ...”
“The answer must be, I think, that the beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
“I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed ...”
“At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]”
“If she[] had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take - and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery ...”
“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”
“Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
“If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No", said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?”
“What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue. ”
“You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you c...”
“One of the few things I know about writing is this:spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book;...”
“A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the skys stars as a patte...”
“I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mari...”
“All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thi...”
