Do not Assume

Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.
― Rainer Maria Rilke 

you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own […] and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

love the questions

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

― Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps everything that frightens us...

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

seeing each other as a whole

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Amy Hempel

Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.

In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.

I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story. 

Amy Hempel

the classic scene

“It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs 

they are all like that

"The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."

"We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.
"And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that."
― Lorrie Moore

Supper

Last night I made a batch of (Royal) brown basmati rice and while that was cooking I chopped vegetables.  I sauteed onions, crimini mushrooms, red bell peppers, broccoli, garlic. I added olive oil, sesame oil, soy sauce, & sriracha and it was divine. This morning I had a sliver of my homemade pumpkin pie with coffee.

Enrich your Life

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

 Stephen King

Perfectionism

I have always loved the raw honesty of Anne Lamott when she talks about the perfectionism struggle...I needed to hear this today. I hope you like these quotes too.

We all need to practice allowing space for ourselves to make creative mistakes. And yes, it's a practice circumventing our egos because the ego wants to step in and protect itself from bruising by being controlling.

Messes, mistakes, that's how we learn. Make a good creative laboratory for yourself, a no judging space! My spittoon notebook is blather to clean out my ears and heart and mind. I turn over and aerate the soil so new things can flow and grow. Does that make sense?

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it. Anne Lamott

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here. Anne Lamott

Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and you're 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn't go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen. Anne Lamott

Musicians have a language for this too.

 

There’s no such thing as a wrong note.

  — Art Tatum

There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.

 — Miles Davis

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards

 that makes it right or wrong. 

 — Miles Davis

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

 —Joseph Chilton Pearce

There are no mistakes in jazz - you are always a semitone from salvation! 

— church joke

There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others. 

—Thelonius Monk  

Do not fear mistakes. There are none. 

— Miles Davis

There are no wrong notes, only wrong resolutions.

— Bill Evans

I think of all harmony as an expansion and a return to the tonic.

— Bill Evans

There are no wrong notes on the piano, just better choices.

—Thelonious Monk

I played the wrong, wrong notes.

—Thelonious Monk

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. Confucius

Three things in life – your health, your mission, and the people you love. That’s it. Naval Ravikant

Action will destroy your procrastination. Og Mandino

Start before you’re ready. Steven Pressfield

I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work. Pearl S. Buck

What may be done at any time will be done at no time. Scottish Proverb

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. Edith Wharton

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. Confucius

Listen to the wind, it talks. Listen to the silence, it speaks. Listen to your heart, it knows. Ojibwe Prayer

New Neighbor

Yesterday I woke at 4:20 AM after a good night of sleep. As I let Romeo into the tiny yard for a quick pee, I noticed people at the 4 farthest garages. So I stood and watched at my back door. One of the guys drove to where I was standing and buzzed down his passenger window. "Why are you staring at my garages? I don't want you to steal my stuff."

"I live here, I've lived here 28 years. I'm just paying attention."

"I called my landlord and said there's a lady staring at my garages. He said 'Don't worry she lives here and watches out for trouble.' I called him three times." I realized he was scared of me. "I've had my stuff stolen at other places. I have my kids stuff. It's dark back here. I am going to put up lights above the garages."

 

I stepped outside my gate and approached his car. "Yes, it is dark back here. That would be great."

 

"I have some extra ones. I will put them up over all the other garages. Even if I buy a house and move out of the garages the lights will stay."

 

"Last night my husband and I were on the porch looking at the full moon," I said. "We saw a red truck with a ladder in it parked at your garages. The driver was inside the truck, waiting."

"Oh, that was my guy, to install the lights. He was calling me but I had fallen asleep."

I reached into his passenger car window to introduce myself. We shook hands. "Nice to meet you, Jose, I'm Emily."

"I wish the nations of the world could do this," I added.

"You'll see us again later this morning putting up the lights."

"Thank you, Jose."

William Maxwell: A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

 ― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

The back of the men’s necks was a mahogany color, and deeply wrinkled. Their hands were large and looked swollen or misshapen and sometimes they were short a finger or two.

 William Maxwell, So Long, See you Tomorrow

The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow 

Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things.

   Richard Ford (Author of Canada)

Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.

― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow 

It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.

 ― Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not ... & No More Parades

Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.

 Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

When you are sixteen

When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again--which is a loss. But to shield yourself--as I didn't do--seems to be an even greater error, since what's lost is the truth of your parents' life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.
― Richard Ford, Wildlife

every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head

It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.
― Richard Ford, Canada

Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that. Richard Ford

Richard Ford, Independence Day

A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life.
― Richard Ford, Independence Day

What's friendship's realest measure? I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups. Richard Ford

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure. Richard Ford

take it seriously

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is to take it seriously, because to do it well is all-consuming.  DAVID GUTERSON

Dear Jean...

I think the best advice on writing I've received was from John Steinbeck, who suggested that one way to get around writer's block (which I was suffering hideously at the time) was to pretend to be writing to an aunt, or a girl friend. I did this, writing to an actress friend I knew, Jean Seberg. The editors of Harpers forgot to take off the salutation and that's how the article begins in the magazine: Dear Jean....

GEORGE PLIMPTON

one serves as a vessel and a voice

The best advice on writing I’ve ever received was given to me, like so much else, by Hubert Selby, Jr.: to learn and to know that writing is not an act of the self, except perhaps as exorcism; that, in writing what is worth being written, one serves, as vessel and voice, a power greater than vessel and voice.

NICK TOSCHES

New Hazard

Tonight we had a walk with Romeo. He was peeing on a lamppost and he suddenly yelped. I took out my flashlight. The post had decorative purple Halloween lights but the end of the string of lights had an exposed outlet. He must've wet the outlet and was zapped. He is fine now but it scared him and scared us.

Hungarian Parking Lot Soup

I suggested to my husband that we make Hungarian Mushroom soup using the Crimini mushrooms we bought and the unopened package of whole milk yogurt I found in the parking lot. He said then it will be Hungarian Parking Lot Soup!

Aphrodite Kallipygos

Callipygian

Callipygian is defined as having well-shaped buttocks. Believe it or not, callipygian means "having a shapely rear end." Callipygian comes from the combination of the two ancient Greek words for "beauty" and "buttocks" and was famously used to name a statue of the Greek Goddess of Love, the so-called Aphrodite Kallipygos, who raises her robe to reveal her backside.

Nick Cave's Red Hand Files

https://www.theredhandfiles.com/connect-to-not-only-myself/.

If you persevere, in time you will have an entirely different problem – not that life is meaningless, but rather that life has almost too much meaning. As the scales fall from your eyes the world rushes into focus, presenting itself with a kind of vibrational eloquence that can, at first, be almost overwhelming. Everything shimmers, everything clarifies, everything wrestles for your attention. Trees feel super-real, their roots plunged into the earth, their branches stretching to the sky, birds are flesh and blood souls, fragile with life, the sky unfolds and rolls, the ocean crashes, people fascinate, books are beautiful, children are whirling dynamos of chaos, dogs bark and cats meow, flowers shout, your neighbour glows, and God runs like a helix through all things. The world awaits you, humming with meaning. You are alive with potential. You are not dead. 

Yesterday or Callipygian

Yesterday as I walked by the police station while walking Romeo a new young cop was checking the VIN number on a citizen's white SUV. Just as he bent over to read the numbers inside the door I saw a man in  skin tight navy blue Spandex short shorts, tight tank top and earrings parade across the parking lot strutting his shapely buttocks. I was eager to see the officer's reaction but he was completely focused on his task.

Know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.

 J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of.

J. D. Salinger "Other People's Secrets" by Joyce Maynard, www.sfgate.com. September 13, 1998.

I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door. J. D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

 J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

  J. D. Salinger

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

 J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

 J. D. Salinger, FOR ESME- WITH LOVE AND SQUALOR

The world is full of actors pretending to be human.

 J. D. Salinger

Kurt Vonnegut

How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore. Kurt Vonnegut 

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. Kurt Vonnegut  

Early morning rising before the sun

My wheat corn oat sourdough woke up in the fridge and rose in the bucket for the 2nd time. It's full of little bubbles so I greased the pans and shaped it into 10 baby loaves. Early morning rising before the sun. It might be ready for baking in 45 minutes. Baking is birth!

Lindsey Heatherly

I don't know if it's true, but I'm reading this nonfiction memoir book about a woman's journey through the seasons of nature over the course of a year. She said the leaves change color because the tree sucks all the chlorophyll back into its trunk and roots and that's why the leaves lose their green color. I thought it was fascinating. That the tree would remember what it needs and take it at the appropriate time. It makes me think of our own bodies and how, when we are in the discomfort of receive mode, it can feel like our bodies and minds won't do what is necessary to make it through. And then we slowly make it back. We slowly take what we need, even if it feels like the opposite. Somehow we do it. Somehow we make it work.

Lindsey Heatherly  

The Call

Ma, I've gotta call you back, I'm in the shower.

Brenda, How come you're always in the shower?

I'm a Cancer,  crabs like water.

Refreshing

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

Comedians and Jazz Musicians

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz. 

― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

bodily and spiritual nourishment

Our most dismaying failure is in the use of our knowledge of what human beings need in the way of bodily and spiritual nourishment. And I suspect that some of the guesses made by our ancestors are partly responsible for the starved bodies and spirits we see everywhere.

― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

 ― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage 

“Our freedom to say or write whatever we please in this country is holy to me. It is a rare privilege not only on this planet, but throughout the universe, I suspect. And it is not something somebody gave us. It is a thing we give to ourselves.
 

Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads--or in other people's heads.
 

And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.
 

By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.
This to me is a miracle.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always to that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. Mark Twain

If you advance confidently in the direction of your dreams and endeavor to live the life that you have imagined…you will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. Henry David Thoreau

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. Theodore Roosevelt

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely. Auguste Rodin

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure, it is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We were all meant to shine as children do. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And as we let our own light to shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same, as we are liberated from our own fear. Our presence automatically liberates others.

 Marianne Williamson

Those who danced were considered to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.

 Angela Monet

Alice Walker: The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

When you dance to your own rhythm, people may not understand you; they may even hate you. But mostly they’ll wish they had the courage to do the same. Sue Fitzmaurice

The House Tour

Her husband had his own bedroom and she showed it to us on the house tour. His bed was king sized with dark mahogany headboard and the covers were rumpled in the center where he must've climbed out. The bedspread was cerulean blue and the sheets were dark gray. The wall to wall carpet was maroon. Around the room there were six cast bronze cannons of various sizes. Some were on the dresser and a few on the floor. "I never sleep in here, I sleep on the couch in my office."

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself. Octavia E. Butler

If you are hoping to find your self-worth and fulfillment in other peoples' opinion of your writing, you will never find it. Anne Lamott

You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it. Anne Lamott

I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.

 Erica Jong

Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry. That's brave. Robert Frost

Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gore Vidal

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them. Gore Vidal

continually visited and abandoned by the tides

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Don't wish me happiness
I don't expect to be happy all the time...
It's gotten beyond that somehow.
Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor.
I will need them all.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Morrow_Lindbergh

Muscular

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising. Stephen King

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway. Stephen King

I have to write to be happy whether I get paid for it or not. But it is a hell of a disease to be born with. I like to do it. Which is even worse. That makes it from a disease into a vice. Then I want to do it better than anybody has ever done it which makes it into an obsession. An obsession is terrible. Hope you haven't gotten any. That's the only one I've got left.

  Ernest Hemingway

Good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up. Stephen King

The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind. Albert Einstein

James Baldwin

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.

 

I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.

 Carl Sandburg

I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way. Carl Sandburg

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose. Stephen King

When I sit down to write, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. George Orwell

The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Writing - the act of one person giving a piece of their soul to another. J. Spredemann

The creative adult is the child who survived.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Stephen King

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future. Carl Sandburg

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. Carl Sandburg

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child. Carl Sandburg

Love your neighbor as yourself; but don't take down the fence. Carl Sandburg

Mr. Dispatch

There were no plants or shrubs in his yard. It looked as if they had been ripped out in a rage. The living room looked like a cross between a hotel room and a crime scene. The fridge had beer, ketchup, yellow mustard and a package of frozen pork chops with one removed. There was a open box of black plastic forks spilled onto the counter. The bed was unmade and laundry overflowed in a pile on a chair. Everything shouted angry divorced man.

[Where ideas come from?] My standard answer is 'I don't know where they come from, but I know where they come to, they come to my desk.' If I'm not there, they go away again, so you've got to sit and think. Philip Pullman

You need to be in the world and you need to be engaged with the world. It's my job to collect jokes. It's my job to collect startling images. And so when I'm out in the world, I'm at work. And I'm a professional. David Sedaris

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise. Oscar Wilde

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way. Ray Bradbury

Dream

I dreamed Scott and his family lived in a Boston apartment with high ceilings. In the dream Scott on a whim, bought a room full exotic tropical plants filling the space. For some reason the windows were open. One plant he showed me was a Venus Flytrap. He spoke to it to get it to close up for the night.

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. Anne Frank

Joyce Carol Oates

 “Writing is like a spiritual manifestation of something deep within us we don't really know is there.”

“Keeping a journal sharpens our senses. It's like an exercise in writing. If you're describing a scene, you are practicing the act of writing—which is very important—and thinking in language.”

“There is an instinct in our species to tell stories. It's a way of explaining the universe and explaining our world.”

“If you can tell a story as briefly as possible, it's more dramatic. If it's too long, then it has the problems of pacing, it could get a little slow. But the shorter you can make a story, the better.”

source

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say. Truman Capote

“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”

“You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.”

“Good writing is rewriting.”

“When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.”

“I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.”

“I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn't fulfill something in me, if I don't honestly feel it's the best I can do, then I'm miserable.”

“It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.”

“It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing.”

Truman Capote

“Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don't put them on paper.”

“Writing in the first person automatically gives you a point of view.”

“I also write the last paragraph or page of a story first. That way I always know what I'm working towards.”

“When I'm writing, I never write more than four hours a day.”

“When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around.”

“That's all a writer has to write about - what he sees and hears and what not.”

“Technically I feel total fluidity in writing. I feel there's nothing technically that I can't do the way a certain sort of pianist feels that. But that doesn't mean it comes easily. It doesn't.”

“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.”

“Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.”

“I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.”

“Failure is the condiment that gives success it's flavour”

“Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.”

“All literature is gossip.”

“I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.”

“Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.”

“Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.”

“One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.”

I turned on the television, the story box that changed the story field of the world. The commercial aspect of stories threatens the diversity of the world's stories and manners of telling. Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo Quotes

We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams. This legacy either will give those who follow us joy on their road or will give them sorrow. 

 

I didn't have the physical handicap of stuttering, but I could not speak coherently. I stuttered I. My mind. I could not express my perception of the sacred.

When sun leaves at dusk, it makes a doorway. We have access to ancestors, to eternity. Breathe out. Ask for forgiveness. Let all hurts and failures go. Let them go.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulnes. John Cheever

triumph over chaos

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.”
― John Cheever

I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.

― John Cheever

If you want to find the trail, if you want to find yourself, you must explore your dreams alone. You must grow at a slow pace in a dark cocoon of loneliness so you can fly like wind, like wings, when you awaken. Francesca Lia Block

I think depression creates in me an urgent need to write, but I also believe that daily stress, and even the positive stress of intense happiness, can compel me to express myself through the written word. Francesca Lia Block

Writing is literally transformative. When we read, we are changed. When we write, we are changed. It’s neurological. To me, this is a kind of magic. Francesca Lia Block

Messages

It’s scary to become a woman in this world. We have to understand that some of the messages we get, messages that we are not enough, are there to keep our power in check. We can’t buy into these messages. Francesca Lia Block

You have to make your own family, your own life. Francesca Lia Block

Incubation versus Procrastination

Sometimes we feel a lot of pressure to create.

I try to see it as a cycle because it is

but try this...

I tell myself keep the pilot light lit or milk the cow. I try to do this with with my spittoon journal.

It's like dripping the faucet so the pipes don't freeze. I think it makes me a better listener and able to harvest from my everyday life. 

Allow for incubation but aim for the intention. Call it incubation rather than procrastination...nourish yourself with the intent to keep on creating. I try to keep the notebook running. Try to see everything as feeding your creativity...what you overhear, what you read, the weather, your commute, frustrations at work, cleaning your house, cooking....incubation!!

A teacher in college once asked us which is more important breathing in or breathing out? of course we jumped in with "in" "out" "in" and the answer is they are equally important.

 

“If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz

 

One of the most wicked destructive forces psychologically speaking, is unused creative power. If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness or for some other reason doesn’t use it, the psychic energy turns into sheer poison. That’s why we often diagnose neurosis and psychotic diseases as not lived higher possibilities.
― Marie-Louise von Franz

“I believe that if you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.”― Joy Harjo

I go to sleep with the problem, and wake up with the answer.

A nap clears the head wonderfully, besides giving fresh energy. I realize that about half the people of the world cannot nap without feeling logy afterward, but for those who can, a nap is a time-saver, not a time-waster. In my twenties, I had to do my own writing in the evenings, as my days were taken up with jobs or hack work. I got into the habit of napping around six, or of being able to if I wished, and of bathing and changing my clothes. This gave me an illusion of two days in one and made me as fresh for the evening, under the circumstances, as I could possibly be. Problems in writing can come unknotted in a miraculous way after a nap. I go to sleep with the problem, and wake up with the answer.

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

You have no idea how valuable your work is, and you probably never will. What you can be sure of is that true value is not to be measured in either sales figures or notoriety. PAUL KINGSNORTH

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible. Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook 

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

― Doris Lessing 

“You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”
― Doris Lessing 

 

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. ”
― Doris Lessing  

Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

 ― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind."
― Kurt Vonnegut

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country 

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

One Bad Apple

I was walking Romeo downtown when I saw a fire behind the newly

purchased B&B motorcycle place at 372 Social Street. The flames were 

partially blocked by two blue plastic bins on wheels obscuring the view 

from the street. Since I was on foot I could see it was an unsecured 

open fire-pit. As I continued home I ran into a city worker at Bouley 

Field. I asked him if he wouldn't mind dialing the fire dept for me.

He was kind to do so and handed me the phone. I stated my name 

and explained that I had spotted an open fire.

"Did you go investigate?" the annoyed Lieutenant asked.

No, I said. "When I saw an unsecured fire I knew I should call." (I know the local

fire laws: no open flames allowed in the city unless secured by a 

screen or chimney).

He said, East School or Rathbun?

I said, no, Social Street, 372, in the back of the newly changed

motorcycle business. It's on their property.

And you thought you should call the fire department?

I thought I did call the fire department.

Okay,  we'll send someone out.

 

I have dealt with him before and he is a pain in the ass.

 

9:35 AM 10/20/23

The ego seeks to divide and separate. Spirit seeks to unify and heal. Pema Chödrön

Don’t let people pull you into their storm. Pull them into your peace. Pema Chödrön

We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves. Pema Chödrön

a box full of darkness

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. Pema Chödrön

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

Pema Chödrön

There’s no way to benefit anybody unless we start with ourselves. Pema Chödrön

True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings. Pema Chödrön

As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion. Pema Chödrön

learn the rhythm of respiration

“Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.”
― Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose 

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

 ― Umberto Eco, Travels In Hyperreality

To Speak

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco

books speak of books

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose 

Grandma's Golumpki Recipe

foodfolksandfun.net/golumpki/

Ghosts

It's October and I am haunted by ghosts both living and dead. I work hard to avoid them but they keep on showing up and surprising me. I have turned on a dime, chosen the back alley home and rerouted my dog walks. They are everywhere.

Dream

I dreamed I was teaching Kris Kristofferson how to make bread in his house. I woke up happy at 3:15 AM

Improvisational Lentil Soup

I just took frozen ground turkey and added olive oil, garlic, onions, celery, lentils, chicken bullion, and water and put it in the instant pot. I also added chipotle sauce. I have last nights leftover cooked potato broccoli and carrots to add after it cooks in the pressure cooker for an hour. Who knows how it will come out. I might have to tweak it... Anyway, I do love one pot meals.

UPDATE: I broke apart the blob of cooked ground turkey and added more chipotle sauce, the potatoes and carrots and broccoli previously cooked, salt and a bit of red wine vinegar. 

It's delicious! A gloop versus a soup.

Maybe next time I buy ground turkey I will shape it into little meat balls and freeze them on a tray and bag them (keeping them frozen) for the next soup.

Update: expanded the gloop to become a soup with turkey spinach bullion olive oil water. Fantastic!

At that time we were all auditioning for love and approval.

At that time we were all auditioning for love and approval. Some of us still are even after our parents have died. That pattern was built at a young age. Those roads and bridges are still standing.

Toko-pa Turner

If you are able to sing from the very wound that you've worked so hard to hide, not only will it give meaning to your own story, but it becomes a corroborative voice for others with a similar wounding.

Toko-pa Turner,   Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home (p 94)

Makes the World Over

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications. It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

RAYMOND CARVER

I have a cat, a stripedy cat with tickling whiskers and green electric eyes. She has the softest fur in the world. When I pet her she purrs as if she has a drum near her heart.

 ― Joy Harjo, The Good Luck Cat

I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind. If I think behind me, I might break. If I think forward, I lose now.

 ― Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems 

the season and its lesson

Home is elusive.
It shapeshifts with the currents
of my heart and its will.
Home is a trickster changing
according to the medicine
of the season and its lesson.

Prodigal Daughters, Kimberly Wesnaut 

― Joy Harjo, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry

Let's not shame our eyes for seeing. Instead, thank them for their bravery.

 ― Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems

In the end

In the end, we must each tend to our own gulfs of sadness, though others can assist us with kindness, food, good words, and music. Our human tendency is to fill these holes with distractions like shopping and fast romance, or with drugs and alcohol.
― Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave: A Memoir 

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame. Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction. Ask for forgiveness. Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.
― Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems 

Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems

Bless the poets, the workers for justice,
the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache,
the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh
meaning—We will all make it through,
despite politics and wars, despite failures
and misunderstandings. There is only love.
― Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems

I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul. Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave

music

“Because Music is a language that lives in the spiritual realms, we can hear it, we can notate it and create it, but we cannot hold it in our hands”
― Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo

 “Be who you are, even if it kills you. 

 

It will. Over and over again.
Even as you live.

Break my heart, why don't you?”
― Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise

True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others. Joy Harjo

some voices are so true

“My father told me that some voices are so true they can be used as weapons, can maneuver the weather, change time. He said that a voice that powerful can walk away from the singer if it is shamed. After my father left us, I learned that some voices can deceive you. There is a top layer and there is a bottom, and they don't match. Like my stepfather's voice. The top layer was jovial and witty and knew how to appeal to those in power. The bottom layer was a belt laced with anger and terrible desire for the teenage daughter of his wife, my mother.”

― Joy Harjo from Sister Nations: Native American Women on Community

build a house of knowledge

“We are all here to serve each other. At some point we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge.”
― Joy Harjo, Poet Warrior: A Memoir

Joy Harjo: I’ve always seen poets as truth tellers. We have an obligation to speak of what we see. Even if the truth is difficult to bear for others or for us, it’s important.

 Joy Harjo: I’ve always seen poets as truth tellers. We have an obligation to speak of what we see. Even if the truth is difficult to bear for others or for us, it’s important. That’s why you always see poets at the forefront or somewhere near any social rights, social justice movement. You’ll find the poet speaking out because that’s what that’s part of the charge of being a poet.

Joy Harjo

“There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.”
― Joy Harjo

“I've always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies”
― Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War

“I know I walk in and out of several worlds each day.”
― Joy Harjo

“It's possible to understand the world from studying a leaf. You can comprehend the laws of aerodynamics, mathematics, poetry and biology through the complex beauty of such a perfect structure.

It's also possible to travel the whole globe and learn nothing.”
― Joy Harjo, The Woman Who Fell from The Sky: Poems

“I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hate twin, but now, I don't know you as myself”
― Joy Harjo

“A story matrix connects all of us.
There are rules, processes, and circles of responsibility in this world. And the story begins exactly where it is supposed to begin. We cannot skip any part.”
― Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave

“I was born with eyes that can never close...”
― Joy Harjo

“All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.”
― Joy Harjo, The Woman Who Fell from The Sky: Poems

“She exists in me now, just as I will and already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams.”
― Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave

Life isn't a matter of milestones, but of moments. Rose Kennedy

When I'm writing, it's a controlled area, and I can think things through a bit more calmly, think through ideas, feelings, sort them. Zadie Smith

Anthony Wilson, Poet, Teacher, Author of Lifesaving Poems

Why do you write?

I think I have to, really. I don’t think it is a choice. (Except, of course, it is.) I don’t go along with the idea of having something to say. I write to find out what I want to say. For me it is about discovery. Things occur to me which I want to say which I would not have said had I not started writing. William Stafford said that, and he was right.

What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

Read. Everything. And forget about having a ‘career’. ‘You make the thing because you love the thing/ and you love the thing because someone else loved it/ enough to make you love it.’ Thomas Lux.

https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2019/10/25/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-anthony-wilson/

https://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/lifesavingpoemsblog/

https://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/

Clothesline

She hung the two red socks on the backyard clothes line and watched and waited. The color was exceptionally bright in contrast to the green lawn. He drove by and then parked and got out and dropped the package in the sandbox and scooped sand over it. He reminded her of a cat using the litter box. When the coast was clear she ran out and grabbed it. The book was wrapped in a brown paper bag.

Jon Fosse interview

I have interviewed several writers who claim that the reason they write is because they cannot speak.

Yes, it’s a bit like that for me. The man from the foreign department quoted Wittgenstein: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. You know this famous twist by Jacques Derrida: “What you cannot say, you have to write.” That’s closer to the way I think about it.*

The Present

There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.
― Meister Eckhart

Freeing your Soul

The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they're not punishing you, they're freeing your soul.
― Meister Eckhart

To the quiet mind all things are possible.

The most powerful prayer, one well-nigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own. ― Meister Eckhart

The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge. Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart: I need to be silent for a while, worlds are forming in my heart.

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.”
― Meister Eckhart

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
― Meister Eckhart, Sermons of Meister Eckhart

“Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.”
― Meister Eckhart

“And suddenly you know: It's time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Some people prefer solitude. They say their peace of mind depends on this.
Others say they would be better off in church.
If you do well, you do well wherever you are. If you fail, you fail wherever you are.
Your surroundings don't matter. God is with you everywhere -- in the market place as well as in seclusion or in the church.
If you look for nothing but God, nothing or no one can disturb you.
God is not distracted by a multitude of things.
Nor can we be.”
― Meister Eckhart

“When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.”
― Meister Eckhart

“I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and the presence of God.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Love is as strong as death, as hard as Hell. Death separates the soul from the body, but love separates all things from the soul.”
― Meister Eckhart

“The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.”
― Meister Eckhart

“We are all meant to be mothers of God...for God is always needing to be born.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love Him as they love a cow - for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God, when they love Him for their own advantage. ”
― Meister Eckhart

“There’s a place in the soul where you’ve never been wounded.”
― Meister Eckhart

“A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.”
― Meister Eckhart

“One must learn an inner solitude, wherever one may be.”
― Meister Eckhart

“One must not always think so much about what one should do, but rather what one should be. Our works do not ennoble us; but we must ennoble our works.”
― Meister Eckhart

“I am what I wanted and I want what I am.”
― Meister Eckhart

“My Lord told me a joke. And seeing Him laugh has done more for me than any scripture I will ever read.”
― Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings

“If I had a friend and loved him because of the benefits which this brought me and because of getting my own way, then it would not be my friend that I loved but myself. I should love my friend on account of his own goodness and virtues and account of all that he is in himself. Only if I love my friend in this way do I love him properly.”
― Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings

“I need to be silent for a while, worlds are forming in my heart.”
― Meister Eckhart

“All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.”
― Meister Eckhart

“God is not good, or else he could do better.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Nobody at any time is cut off from God.”
― Meister Eckhart

“For the person who has learned to let go and let be, nothing can ever get in the way again.”
― Meister Eckhart

Jacques Derrida

“What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.”
― Jacques Derrida

“Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.”
― Jacques Derrida

“I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.”
― Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida

“I speak only one language, and it is not my own.”
― Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other: or, The Prosthesis of Origin

“Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.”
― Jaques Derrida

“No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.”
― Jacques Derrida

I think the best advice I’ve learned from life is to listen to yourself, not to others. Stick to what you have, not to what you want to have or wish you had.

 I think the best advice I’ve learned from life is to listen to yourself, not to others. Stick to what you have, not to what you want to have or wish you had. Stay close to yourself, to your inner voice and vision and how you want the writing to be. When my first novel was published it got lots of bad reviews, and they haunted me, and if I had listened to them I would have stopped writing. I decided to listen to myself instead—to what I knew. Ever since then that has been a kind of rule for me.

Of course this goes both ways. For some years now my writing has been well received, and I’ve received many awards and so on, but I try to not let it influence my writing in any way. Good reaction or bad reaction: it doesn’t matter, I stick to what I know, what I feel I need to write, what I can do and not what I want to do. For example, my plays were a great success but I decided to stop writing plays, and I stopped for many years.

JON FOSSE

Everything for me, in a way, ends up in a paradox. Jon Fosse

Your writing is wiser, and it knows more than you as a person know. It’s bigger. It’s the gift of all great literature, I think. 

 ***

To meet a literary voice that really talks to you, it’s rare. It’s like a new friendship. It doesn’t happen that often.

***

To manage to write and to write well, that’s grace. And I think perhaps life in itself might be a kind of grace. I can completely understand people who decide to leave this life. It’s an awful place in many ways. You can also think of death as a grace. To be here all the time, it must be awful.

In this fallen world, to use that Christian phrase, life is a kind of gift and a kind of grace. But then it becomes all too paradoxical. Everything for me, in a way, ends up in a paradox. And sometimes I feel I’m so full of contradictions that I can hardly understand how I manage to stay together, to be one.

***

Do you often think about death?

No. I think the closer you get, the older you get, the less you think about it.

I think it was Cicero who said that philosophy is a way of learning to die. And I think literature is also a way of learning to die. It’s as much about death as about life. I guess this has to do with the form of great literature, of art. Art is alive when you create it, and there’s a reader who can bring it to life again. But as an object it’s dead.*

A Place Where I Liked to Stay

The first text I wrote, when I was twelve or thirteen, was the lyrics to a song. I wrote some poems and small stories. And I felt that when I wrote for myself and by myself, not for school, it was very private. I had found a place where I liked to stay.

Tell me about that place.

It’s a secure place. And it’s still the place I found at the age of twelve by myself. I’m sixty-two now, and that place—it isn’t me, but it’s in me somehow. It’s different from me as a person. I normally say that I’m Jon the person. And then there’s an official image of me. That’s Jon Fosse. But the writer, he has no name.

That place is for listening and for movement, and it’s a very safe place to stay. But it can also be scary, because it’s the route for me to enter the unknown. I have to go to the borders of my mind, and I have to cross these borders. And to cross these borders is frightening if you’re feeling very fragile. I was like that for some years. I simply didn’t dare to write my own things because I was afraid of crossing these borders in myself. When I’m writing well, I have this very clear and distinct feeling that what I’m writing on is already written. It’s somewhere out there. I just have to write it down before it disappears. *

He taught me to always take out the maximum number of books—I think it was 12—so in case there were books I didn't like, I'd always have something else to read.

Did your becoming a writer start with a love of reading?

Janet Fitch: Yes. My father was an engineer—he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms—"Have you read this? And this? And this?" He taught me to always take out the maximum number of books—I think it was 12—so in case there were books I didn't like, I'd always have something else to read. If I became a reader and then a writer, I can say that it was because of his love of books and his sharing that love. When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small—and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder. *

Take Notes

I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

- Janet Finch, White Oleander

By Heart

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

Room to Grow

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

Something to be Proud of

One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness and functioning at all, it's something to be proud of, not ashamed of.

They should issue medals along with the steady stream of medication.
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

Carrie Fisher

“Anyway, George comes up to me the first day of filming and he takes one look at the dress and says, 'You can't wear a bra under that dress.'
So, I say, 'Okay, I'll bite. Why?'
And he says, 'Because... there's no underwear in space.'
I promise you this is true, and he says it with such conviction too! Like he had been to space and looked around and he didn't see any bras or panties or briefs anywhere.
Now, George came to my show when it was in Berkeley. He came backstage and explained why you can't wear your brassiere in other galaxies, and I have a sense you will be going to outer space very soon, so here's why you cannot wear your brassiere, per George. So, what happens is you go to space and you become weightless. So far so good, right? But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn't- so you get strangled by your own bra. Now I think that this would make a fantastic obit- so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

The Barking Dog

The barking dog went from window to window. All of them were open. The ten year old Golden Retriever could be heard from the Elk's parking lot four blocks away. 

After two days of nonstop barking I drafted a letter to the dog officer but didn't mail it. On the third day the dog was quiet and then the fourth and fifth days too. Someone in the building must've complained. It seemed to be resolved. 

Now whenever I hear the dog bark I bristle and worry that it will go on all day. The barks usually stop after 5 or 6 barks. I'm starting to trust the situation and now I feel the intervals between barks as pauses of hope.

Phyllis

Phyllis couldn't stand knowing the little yellow leaves were falling onto her newly paved driveway so she got up and went out to the garage and started up the gasoline powered leaf blower and got to work. She was nearly done when Sheriff Otto showed up. "Dressed for a party I see," Sheriff Otto called out. She jumped.

"I couldn't sleep knowing leaves were littering my new driveway." She was wearing a flowered flannel nightie and her husband's NRA camo hunting jacket and panda slippers.

"It would be fine if you were using a push broom but this piece of equipment is so loud the whole east end of town has woken up and they're all calling me! So please, Mrs Rose, put that damn thing away. It's three AM!"

A whimsy in doing things the roundabout way

There is a whimsy in those lifestyle choices and hobbies, a whimsy in doing things the roundabout way. It is simple enough to argue that the most direct path is the best one, but humanity doesn’t really work like that. As a species, we learn by doing — and often enough, we find joy in it. Taking the time to master a skill, to understand a process or to have a conversation — even if it isn’t quite as fast — is consistently more rewarding than having something simply done for you. Efficiency-focused single-mindedness might make things faster, but it is a thief of life’s joys.* Parker Richards

It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within.

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.

NADINE GORDIMER

There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

― G.K. Chesterton

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. G.K. Chesterton

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see. G.K. Chesterton

A small man in search of a balcony

 article

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations