“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”
—
-James Joyce, Ulysses
Happy Bloomsday!
(via themissourireview)June 2013
6 posts
“Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet: February 17, 1903, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (via litverve)
“Good fiction is made of what is real, and reality is difficult to come by.”
—Ralph Ellison
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories” —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (via justanotherquoteblog)
We lived in the gaps between the stories” —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (via justanotherquoteblog)
“I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains. Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun, go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God. Think of the beauty that again and again discharges itself within and without you and be happy.”
—May We Be Forgiven: A Novel
A.M. Homes
“Danger gleams like sunshine to a brave man’s eyes.”
—Euripides (via eulum)
May 2013
4 posts
UFARATZA: c/o louise erdrich →
k-rad.tumblr.com
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs at the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
…
“What interests me about the relationship between language/representation and the body is that the threshold is extremely telling. One of the most corporeal texts ever written was Walt Whitmanâs Leaves of Grass. That interests me. The acute embodiment of his language, how a reader feels more inside her own body in his poetics. It interests me that what I think of as acutely corporeal writing is on the decline in our present tense. Why is that I wonder. In its place we have a large swath of some quasi-domestic realism going on. Middle-aged people having sex or not having it, getting divorced or married or producing offspring or taking care of aging parents or going through endlessly bourgeois plot lines, particularly white heterosexual bourgeois plot lines. The most exciting work to me today is work that deviates via corporeal truths and plot lines. What interests me about the relationship between language/representation and the body is that the threshold is extremely telling.”
— Lidia Yuknavitch in An ABR Interview withJeffrey A. Sartain
“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.”
—Mario Vargas Llosa (via wordpainting)
“People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience. The lady that only read books that improved her mind was taking a safe course—and a hopeless one. She’ll never know whether her mind is improved or not, but should she ever, by some mistake, read a great novel, she’ll know mighty well that something is happening to her.”
—Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (with thanks to settledthingsstrange and habitofbeing)
April 2013
8 posts
“You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.”
—Anne Carson, Plainwater (via emmaylor)
“Every literary work is forced upon its author in a mixture of vision, memory, idea, and action. Everything in the course of an individual’s life becomes somehow a part of her art.”
—Marguerite Yourcenar
“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief… Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a form around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may you cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy with your own life. Within it you watch yourself act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.”
—Anne Carson (via mttbll)
“Our common heart grieves.”
—
“Why is self-expression, the relentless self-portrait, not a potentially legitimate form of art? Why do we have this notion that to write the autobiographical (especially if you are a woman), even in the context of a novel, is to not write literature?”
—Kate Zambreno—-Heroines
“Let’s restore to publishing its true reputation—not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian. The business of literature is blowing shit up.
What Is the Business of Literature?
Richard Nash
Spring 2013 VQR” —What is the business of literature
Richard Nash
VQR
Spring 2013
What Is the Business of Literature?
Richard Nash
Spring 2013 VQR” —What is the business of literature
Richard Nash
VQR
Spring 2013
“A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.”
—Raymond Carver (via theparisreview)
“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
—Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (via kindoflikethat)
March 2013
9 posts
“It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.”
—Doris Lessing
“Any form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art form is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, ‘I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.”
—C. McCullers. (via acandleandawick)
“Sometimes a mind is just born late, coming through waves on a a slower journey.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch , “The Chronology of Water: a memoir”
“Had I been born a man I would by now have made a deep impression of myself on the world - on some part of it. But I am a woman, and God, or the Devil, or Fate, or whoever it was, has flayed me of the thick outer skin and thrown me out into the midst of Life - has left me a lonely damned thing filled with the red, red blood of ambition and desire, but afraid to be touched, for there is no thick skin between my sensitive flesh and the world’s fingers. But I want to be touched.”
—The Story of Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane
“A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.”
—alain robbe-grillet (via altlitgossip)
“But after all, “I” am a woman.”
—Elizabeth Hardwick Sleepless Nights
“This is what fiction is about—that something is taking place and that nothing lasts. Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express. The lie, the look, the grief are without permanence, the watch continues to tick where the story stops.”
—Mavis Gallant, “What is Style?” in The Canadian Forum (via learningfromthehands)
February 2013
4 posts
“I’ll return to the unknown part of myself and when I am born shall speak of “he” or “she.” For now, what sustains me is the “that” that is an “it.” To create a being out of oneself is very serious. I am creating myself. And walking in complete darkness in search of ourselves is what we do. It hurts. But these are the pains of childbirth: a thing is born that is. Is itself. It is hard as a dry stone. But the core is soft and alive, perishable, perilous it. Life of elementary matter.”
—Clarice Lispector, AGUA VIVA page 38
On Rules
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
January 2013
5 posts
“Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:
I
I
I
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” —Joan Didion (via suzannescanlon)
I
I
I
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” —Joan Didion (via suzannescanlon)
“Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.”
—Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell (via rachelfershleiser)
“I love you, even if there isn’t any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald (via theunquotables)
“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.”
—
Susan Sontag, Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 143
Interviewed by Edward Hirsch
December 2012
5 posts
“When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment—once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in—what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.”
—Zadie Smith (via tightasaknot)
“Sail nowhere save among the continents of your own soul, and, when your body at long last gives up its war upon you, sloughs away, returning you to infancy, the final hinged panel of the polyptych called yourself having been reached and rushed beyond, leave the useless remainder behind on the wicked midden heap it is.”
—CALENDAR OF REGRETS by Lance Olsen
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
—― Joan Didion, The White Album
November 2012
5 posts
“Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true.”
—Louise Erdrich (via mttbll)
Other Notebooks Are Available: Want to write a feminist body horror short-short about lymph glands... →
othernotebooksareavailable.tumblr.com
Want to write a feminist body horror short-short about lymph glands and swollen stomachs and acne and scars and bruises and but nothing at all to do with 1.sex (the acts - particularly heterosexual acts), 2. pregnancy. Something that gets beyond the idea of a woman’s body as primarily tooled…
October 2012
14 posts
“Either you want a kid or you don’t—that’s your business.”
—Helene Cixous, THE LAUGH OF THE MEDUSA
“Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren’t men, or that the mother doesn’t have one. But isn’t this fear convenient for them? Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”
—Helene Cixous,The Laugh of the Medusa (via inkspotteddreams)
