Quotes Week, Part Five

For Paul:

• The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind. ~Kahlil Gibran

For Elana:

• No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted. ~Aesop

For Shannon:

• When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" ~Howard Ikemoto

For Sarah:

• One can't live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us. ~Philip Zimbardo

Quotes Week, Part Four

For Mike:

• A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

For Justine:

• Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness. ~James Thurber

On characters:

• Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves. ~Carl Jung

Quotes Week, Part Three

To consider when revising:

• Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ~Colette, Casual Chance, 1964

On plotting:

• A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ~Jean Luc Godard

On everything:

• An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. ~Gustave Flaubert

Quotes Week, Part Two

For Jessica:

• Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen

For Bryan:

• The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. ~Mark Twain

For Andrew:

• A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. ~Mignon McLaughlin

And for all of us:

• Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn't we? ~Terri Guillemets

Quotes Week, Part One

This week I'm just going to be featuring a bunch of quotes about writing. Because, well, I need to be writing, instead of blogging. So here you go:

For Simon:

• You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbury

For me (because I need to remember this while in revision):

• I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard

For Ted:

• If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison

Quote for Friday

I wasn't going to blog today, because my awesome little sister is in town and I took the day off! But I ran across this quote yesterday and it was too awesome not to share:

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."

- C.S. Lewis

Have a great weekend!