To read fully as an adult must be -- I believe -- to relive something of that wondrous childhood incipience tempered with the adult's chastened backward vision
Rosanna Warren
The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading
Milkweed Editions, 1997, p265
My mother read as if her life depended upon it. Sitting on the living room sofa behind the coffee table piled high with library books, she would open a book and disappear. She didn't fidget or nibble snacks or look up. While reading, she had an expression of calm, transported by the story to another place. One day I saw her sitting at a table bent over a book with her elbows firmly planted. She was frozen, motionless except to turn the pages. I walked by her again several hours later. She closed the 350-page book, looked up, and said, "That was a great book!" I share my mother's attitude toward reading.
Juanita Havill
"Journey of a Lifetime"
The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading
Milkweed Editions, 1997, p94
Right away I saw how writing made things feel more real somehow than just thinking. You could stand back and look at them. You could almost live twice!
Naomi Shihab Nye
The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading
edited by Michael Dorris and Emilie Buchwald
Milkweed Editions, 1997
p194
All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story teller who would keep that from you.
Ernest Hemingway
Death in the Afternoon
Why are you giving me Shakespearean shit?
Cheryl Swanson (to her husband)
We don't know who we are until we see what we can do.
Martha Grimes
VS
How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
E.M. Forster
VS
The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?"
Graham Wallas (1858-1932)
The Art of Thought [1926]
I don't believe in craft in the abstract -- each individual novel is its own rule book, training ground, factory, and independent republic.
Zadie Smith
The Believer, June 2008, p5
I'm reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who jotted down this idea for a story in one of his astounding notebooks:
A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions: that the characters act otherwise than he thought: that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate -- he having made himself one of the personages.
WANT
The world is awash in unwanted dogs;
like-alike yellow curly-haired mongrels that come
collared and wormed, neutered and named, through customs
come immunized, racketing and rabies-tagged
to Midwestern farms from Save the Children, the Peace Corps
come from Oxfam into the carpeted bedrooms of embassies
into the Brooklyn lofts of CARE workers on leave
into the London, Paris, Geneva homes of Doctors Without Borders
and still the streets of Asmara, Kigali, Bombay
refill with ur-dogs: those bred-back scavenging flea-ridden
sprung-ribbed bitches whose empty teats make known
the latest bitten-off litter of curs that go back to the Pleistocene.
And what of the big-headed stick-figured children naked
in the doorways of Goma, Luanda, Juba, Les Hants
or crouched in the dust of the haphazard donkey-width tracks
that connect the named and the nameless hamlets of Want?
There will always be those who speed past unbeguiled.
There will always be somewhere a quorum of holy fools
who wade into the roiling sea despite the tsunami
to dip teaspoon after teaspoon from the ocean.
Maxine Kumin
Many of the Bratslavers, grown fanatically religious, had abandoned their trades. Their wives, influenced by their pious husbands, did not ask them for money. And their emaciated, dejected children, condemned to anemia, made no demands either, knowing full well that there was nothing to be got from their parents.
Der Nister
The Family Mashber
Book One, Chapter Three
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