George Saunders: Stories

It is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

George Saunders

“Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality–your soul, if you will–is as bright and shining as any that has ever been....Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.”
― George Saunders

Dream

I was in a park and I heard one note of a voice. That sounds like Michael Murphy, I thought and when I turned around there he was. "I knew it was you," I said. "This must be your father, he looks just like you."

Ray Bradbury: Read Poetry

“Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.

What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don’t force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing


“We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“We never sit anything out. We are cups, quietly and constantly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Ray Bradbury

“We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.

A variation of this is true for writers. Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days.

But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity

Ray Bradbury

“Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity

“Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Ray Bradbury

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“Write. Don't think. Relax.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Amber Dermont

“You know, I'm going to make it a point whenever I see you to be like the ocean. You can look to me for relief.”
― Amber Dermont, The Starboard Sea

“It's how we know we're alive," ginger said. "We grieve the dead.”
― Amber Dermont, The Starboard Sea

“I slept well that night because someone had been kind to me.”
― Amber Dermont, The Starboard Sea

Carol Shields

“Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.”
― Carol Shields, Small Ceremonies

“It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.”
― Carol Shields, The Republic of Love

“It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping: our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.”
― Carol Shields, Small Ceremonies

“Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don't make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.”
― Carol Shields, The Orange Fish

Carol Shields

Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.
- Carol Shields, Republic of Love

May Sarton

It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it – and I do and always have – then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.
- May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude (p67)

Insist on It

Article

Exile

Ever since the election I've had to protect myself from listening to National Public Radio and reading The New York Times political articles in order to keep from taking a nose dive. Instead I am finding inspiring things to read. I listen to RADIO CLASSIQUE on the Internet, streaming from France. Even bad news spoken in French sounds beautiful.

Dream

I dreamed I was at a writing assembly and there were people of all ages and even dogs in the audience.

Ram Dass

BE LOVE NOW
By Ram Dass

In the West surrender implies giving up power. But surrendering to a guru or the Beloved doesn’t mean giving power to another human being—it’s letting go of the stuff that keeps you separate. Each time you surrender, it leads you further in, deeper into yourself. You surrender to that place in yourself that takes you beyond form.

Renouncing the attachments and desires that are holding you back can be really difficult when you are trying to do it in an achievement-oriented, driven sort of way. On the other hand, giving things up is incredibly easy in the presence of love. They just dissolve. Those of you who have had a really powerful love relationship will recognize what it is like to care more about your beloved than yourself. Your favorite food is on the table, and your main concern is that your lover should have enough of it. You are fulfilled when your lover eats.

That’s what you experience when you have a child. People say, “Aren’t you self-effacing, aren’t you sacrificing for your child?” But it isn’t sacrifice—it’s joy. Austerities done with a dry heart are heavy, but when they’re done with love you’re saying, “Let me give this up for my beloved. It will bring us closer!” When you really want to get close to your beloved, you can’t give things up fast enough. Love lubricates the whole process. You just get more joyful.

Falling in love is a desire to merge with, to be completely immersed in love for, and be loved by the beloved. You want to know your beloved more and more intimately. That yearning has motivated human beings to give up everything, to renounce all forms of gratification, even life itself. Throughout history, people have undergone the greatest sacrifices to consummate their love. To love God or the guru is to let go of everything that separates you from the Beloved. This is the essence of devotional surrender and renunciation.

When they’re misunderstood, the external acts that characterize surrender and renunciation can be motivated by a desire to imitate, by guilt, feelings of unworthiness, self-righteousness, a desire for security in structure, or masochism. But anyone who truly loves knows that to give up one’s own happiness for the beloved is none of those things. It is the purest, most opening and flowing total ecstasy.

True, sometimes you have to prime the pump before your heart is open enough to love that deeply. You begin a process of purification based on how you think it could be. It’s like diving into deep water—first you have to walk to the end of the diving board. You undergo purifications to get into a position to fall in love with God. You become disciplined not out of guilt, shame, or moral responsibility, but out of an incredible yearning to be pure enough to be with God. The actual moment of diving in is the inevitable culmination of your training and preparation.

—————————————————————————————————

Ram Dass first travelled to India in 1967 as Dr. Richard Alpert, an eminent Harvard psychologist. There he met his guru, Neem Karoli Baba (affectionately known as Maharaj-ji), who gave Ram Dass his name, which means “servant of God.” Upon his return from India, Ram Dass became a pivotal cultural influence and has served as a guiding light for over forty years, carrying millions along on the journey. He is the co-founder of the Seva Foundation and lives in Maui, Hawaii. www.Ramdass.org

Excerpted from Be Love Now: The Path of the Heart by Ram Dass with Rameshwar Das.

Martin Luther King Jr.

“People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

“The great glory of the American democracy is the right to protest for right.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

“Courage is an inner resolution to go forward despite obstacles; Cowardice is submissive surrender to circumstances. Courage breeds creativity; Cowardice represses fear and is mastered by it. Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience ask the question, is it right? And there comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”

“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

“By opening our lives to God in Christ, we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists … Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”

“Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.”

“The God whom we worship is not a weak and incompetent God. He is able to beat back gigantic waves of opposition and to bring low prodigious mountains of evil. The ringing testimony of the Christian faith is that God is able.”

“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

“The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’

-Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. Dignity and Discipline

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as ‘right-to-work.’ It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘works.’ Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining… We demand this fraud be stopped.”

“In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.”

-Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

“Everybody can be great … because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

“We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.”

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

“Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.”

“Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.”

“Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”

“We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.”

“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

“Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.”

“The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.”

“We cannot walk alone.”

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

“I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.”

“Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.”

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.”

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.”

“Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.”

-Martin Luther King Jr.