Letters of Sherwood Anderson
April, 1935

"Dear Roy Jansen: I think the most absorbingly interesting and exciting moment in any writer's life must come at the moment when he, for the first time, knows that he is a real writer. Any professional writer, any Hemingway, Wolfe, Faulkner, Stein, Dreiser, Lewis - I could name a dozen others, prosemen, I mean - will know what I mean. You begin, of course, being not yourself. We all do. There have been so many great ones. "If I could write as that man does." There is, more than likely, some one man you follow slavishly. How magnificently his sentences march. It is like a field being plowed. You are thinking of the man's style, his way of handling words and sentences.

You read everything the man has written, go from him to others. You read, read, read. You live in the world of books. It is only after a long time that you know that this is a special world, fed out of the world of reality, but not of the world of reality.

You have yourself not yet brought anything up out of the real world into this special world, to make it live there.

And then, if you are ever to be a real writer, your moment comes. I remember mine. I walked along a city street in the snow. I was working at work I hated. Already I had written several long novels. They were not really mine. I will ill, discouraged, broke. I was living in a cheap rooming house. I remember that I went upstairs and into the room. It was very shabby. I had no relatives in the city and few enough friends. I remember how cold the room was. On that afternoon I had heard that I was to lose my job.

( Read more... )

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore
A seven iron, Tuck, thought.  After all these years I need a seven iron.

Tucker Case did not play golf.  He'd tried it once, and although he'd enjoyed the drinking and driving the little electric car into the lake, he just didn't get the appeal.  It seemed - and he'd examined the game closely because his father had loved it - an awful lot like a bunch of rich white guys in goofy clothing walking around on an absurdly large lawn hitting absurdly small white balls with crooked sticks.  If the greens were at opposite ends of the same fairway and foursomes had to play against each other, defending their own green while assaulting the opponents' and risking getting hit with a ball or a club at close quarters, well, then you'd have a game.  If the game was scored on how quickly one got through the eighteen holes instead of the fewest strokes and they dropped small-block Chevys into the little carts, why, then you'd have yourself a game.  (Maybe put those little Ben-Hur food processors on the wheels and make it legal to hamstring competitors.)  But traditional golf, as it was, had always left Tuck cold.  Strange, then, that he absolutely yearned for a seven iron, or maybe a shotgun.

 Tuck had been up since before dawn, awakened rudely and kept awake by what seemed like eight million roosters.  It was now ten o'clock and they were still going strong.  What joy to feel the thwack of a seven iron on red feathers, the satisfying impact of balanced metal on poultry (suddenly silenced and somewhat tenderized for your trouble).  He saw himself wading into a bucket of roosers, swinging his seven iron madly (but always keeping his head down and his left arm straight), dealing death and destruction like the Colonel's own avenging angel.  Welcome to Tucker Case's chicken death camp, my little feathered friends.  Now, kindly prepare to have your nuggets knocked off.

Tucker Case was not a morning person.

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

On faith
In deep, resonant tones, the vicar tells us of Pippa's beauty and her unfailing goodness. I don't know this flat placard of a girl. I wish I could stand and give a full account of her—the Pippa who could be vain and selfish and in love with her romantic illusions; the Pippa who was also brave and determined and generous. And even if I told them all this, it still wouldn't be a full measure of her. You can never really know someone completely. That's why it's the most terrifying thing in the world, really—taking someone on faith, hoping they'll take you on faith too. It's such a precarious balance, it's a wonder we do it at all. And yet…

- A Great & Terrible Beauty by Libby Bray -

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

"my heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. "tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. and that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with god and with eternity."

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

As she stood in the nursery waiting for her cousins' return she sensed she could write a scene like the one by the fountain and she could include a hidden observer like herself. She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite fountain pen. She could see the simple sentences, the accumulating telepathic symbols, unfurling at the nib's end. She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She did not need to judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

--Ian McEwan, Atonement

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

Man and Superman. A Comedy and Philosophy. - Bernard Shaw

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

After reading the opening line of The Outsiders here a few days ago, I couldn't help but pick up the book again. I couldn't stop grinning to myself, because it was like meeting old-time friends again.

So anyway, here's an extract:
She kind of shrugged. 'I could just tell. I'll bet you watch sunsets, too.' She was quiet for a minute after I nodded. 'I used to watch them, too, before I got so busy...'

I pictured that, or tried to. Maybe Cherry stood still and watched the sun set while she was supposed to be taking the garbage out. Stood there and watched and forgot everything else until her big brother screamed at her to hurry up. I shook my head. It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps weren't so different. We saw the same sunset.

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman"
( Read more... )

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

A Separate Peace // John Knowles
"The winter loves me," he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, "I mean, as much as you can say a season can love. What I mean is, I love winter, and when you love something, it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love." I didn't think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought or belief of Finny's: it should have been true. So I didn't argue.

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

"One of the the drawbacks about adventures is that when you come to the most beautiful places you are often too anxious and hurried to appreciate them[.]"

-The Chronicles of Narnia: The Horse and his Boy, C.S. Lewis

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair by Ray Bradbury
"Are you that afraid, Ollie? Don't you believe in me or you or anything? God, why are men such cowards, and why the hell do you have such thin skins and are afraid of a woman like a ladder to lean on. Listen, I've got things to do and you're coming with me. I can't leave you here, you'll fall down those damn stairs. But if I have to, I will. I want everything now, not tomorrow. That means you, Paris, and my job. Your novel will take time, but you'll do it. Now, do you do it here and feel sorry for yourself, or do we live in a cold-water walk-up flat in the Latin Quarter a long way off from here? This is my one and only offer, Ollie. I've never proposed before, I won't ever propose again, it's hard on my knees. Well?"

"Have we had this conversation before?" he said.

"A dozen times in the last year, but you never listened, you were hopeless."

"No, in love and helpless."

"You've got one minute to make up your mind. Sixty seconds." She was staring at her wristwatch.

"Get up off the floor," he said, embarrassed.

"If I do, it's out the door and gone," she said. "Forty-nine seconds to go, Ollie."

"Stan," he groaned.

"Thirty," she read her watch. "Twenty. I've got one knee off the floor. Ten. I'm beginning to get the other knee up. Five. One."

And she was standing on her feet.

"What brought this on?" he asked.

"Now," she said, "I am heading for the door. I don't know. Maybe I've thought about it more than I dared even notice. We are very special wondrous people, Ollie, and I don't think our like will ever come again in the world, at least not to us, or I'm lying to myself and I probably am. But I must go and you are free to come along, but can't face it or don't know it. And now--" she reached out. "My hand is on the door and--"

"And?" he said, quietly.

"I'm crying," she said.

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

They said that in the South there's an azure sea,
and in that sea there is an island, and on that island there is a tower,
and in that tower there is a golden stove bed.
On that bed there is a girl with long hair - one is gold, the next is silver,
one is gold, and the next is silver. She lies there braiding her tresses,
just braiding her long tresses, and as soon as she finishes the world will come to an end.


-

There is a great river, three years' walk from here.
In that river there is a fish - Blue Fin.
It talks with a human voice, cries and laughs, and swims back and forth across that river.
When it swims to one side and laughs, the dawn starts playing,
the sun rises up in the sky, and the day comes. 
When it goes back, it cries, drags the darkness with it,
and hauls the moon by its tail.
All the stars in the sky are Blue Fin's scales. 



Tatyana Tolstaya - The slynx.
pg. 7

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

Ovid; Metamorphoses
Alas for me, love is incurable
With any herb; the arts which cure the others
Do me, their lord, no good!

Metamorphoses by Ovid; translated by Rolfe Humphries
Book 1; lines 524-526

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

Reincarnation?
“What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?” - Friedrich Nietzsche

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

audrey niffenegger
Henry says he knows me in the future. Huge black clouds are moving up from behind the trees, they come so suddenly that I laugh, theyare like puppets, and everything is swirling toward me and there is a long low peal of thunder. I am suddenly aware of myself standing thin and upright in a Meadow where everything has flattened itself down and so I like down hoping to be unnoticed by the storm which rolls up and I am flat on my back  looking up when  water begins to pour down from the sky. My clothes are soaked in an instant and I suddenly feel that Henry is there, an incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hands on me even while it seems to me that Henry is the rain and I am alone wanting him.

Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

"...leaving Raoul on the verge of composing one of those trite romantic lyrics that, lacking the ivory flame of great poetry, nevertheless stay with a person forever, like a scar, a tattoo, or third-grade arithmetic."


" 'The radios that pass by here play nothing but rap music. Sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.'

" 'While shoving 'em both up a guard dog's ass.' "

--Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis
The world was already acting strange millions of years ago.

Water had its way with rock. Liquid beat solid. Ice is supposed to be obdurate, unyielding, but back then it rippled and flowed. The glacier rode the world, and the world let it change it, like a girl riding her lover and turning his prick to foam. Exactly the way it is today.

The world was strange from day one. Let there be light, God said, and there was light. There is probably nothing more beautiful and implausible than the world, nothing that makes less sense, the gray bud of the willow, silky and soft, the silk-white throat of the cobra, the wish of nature or humans to subsume all living matter in fire and flood. I will hurt you, hurt you, hurt you, says the world, and then a meadow arches its back and golden pollen sprays forth.

Everyone prefers to stick with the subject of people, but how shortsighted to leave out the question of how we got here and where we're going.

At least four glaciers covered Varennes over the past three million years.

And even then, how beautiful! Rock cased in ice, the sun extracting greens and blues. Though to say everything was more beautiful without people, before people--even to go so far as to imagine after people--is obscene.

(Read Comments |Comment on this)

The Mercy of Thin Air - one of my favorite books
Remember the night you pointed to the night star and told me that when you were a child, you were afraid the creatures and objects would fall from the sky and crush you? You believed they were there among those constellation points, that if one of those lights went out, like a pin removed from a seam, the weight would tear the rest away and leave them at the mercy of thin air.

Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air

(Read Comments |Comment on this)