Category Archives: quotes

poetry, quotes, writing

thou art all my art

LXXVIII.

So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse
And found such fair assistance in my verse
As every alien pen hath got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse.
Thine eyes that taught the dumb on high to sing
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly
Have added feathers to the learned’s wing
And given grace a double majesty.
Yet be most proud of that which I compile,
Whose influence is thine and born of thee:
In others’ works thou dost but mend the style,
And arts with thy sweet graces graced be;
But thou art all my art and dost advance
As high as learning my rude ignorance.
-W.S.

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quotes

it cannot be demanded

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.

It is sometimes necessary to be silent for months before the central image of a book can occur. I do not write every day. I read every day, think every day, work in the garden every day, and recognize in nature the same slow complicity, the same inevitability. The moment will arrive, always it does, it can be predicted but it cannot be demanded. I do not think of this as inspiration. I think of this as readiness.

– Jeannette Winterston, “A Work of My Own,” ART OBJECTS: ESSAYS ON ECSTACY AND EFFRONTERY

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quotes, the chorus

the slaughter of the chorus

The chorus does everything in Greek theater except become a main character – kill or be killed, love or fall in love. Zack’s friend and mine, Sumana, sent me this Socrates quote a couple weeks ago and I only just looked at it:

“Do you regret that we have not become important, like the kings we see in tragedy, men like Atreus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, and Aegisthus? They are always portrayed as victims of murder, as figures to be lamented, as preparing and eating evil banquets. No tragic poet has had the audacity or lack of decency to introduce into his play the slaughter of the chorus.”

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quotes

A says: “I may have a relationship in my future” and B says: “That’s better than having one in your past”

So now I’m going back again,
I got to get to her somehow.
All the people we used to know,
They’re an illusion to me now.
Some are mathematicians,
Some are carpenters’ wives –
Don’t know how it all got started,
I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives.
But me, I’m still on the road
Heading for another joint –
We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point
of view,
Tangled up in blue…

– Dylan, Bob.

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quotes, writing

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

Rest in peace.

Part of it has to do with living in an era when there’s so much entertainment available, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how fiction is going to stake out its territory in that sort of era. You can try to confront what it is that makes fiction magical in a way that other kinds of art and entertainment aren’t. And to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine. It’s unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, but it’s neat. There’s so much mass commercial entertainment that’s so good and so slick, this is something that I don’t think any other generation has confronted. That’s what it’s like to be a writer now. I think it’s the best time to be alive ever and it’s probably the best time to be a writer. I’m not sure it’s the easiest time.

-DFW (he has my initials) in an 1996 interview with Laura Miller.

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a propos of nothing, quotes

If all else fails, if by all else you mean all this –

More of the unexpected from Chicago strangers. Yesterday, I took a taxi home along Division, with my arms full of discount linens from the Roosevelt Target. I talked to the driver about the high cost of living, the low cost of the Midwest, and being a playwright. He suggested that I should, perhaps, look into driving a taxi. At the end of the ride, he told me I was giving him too big of a tip because “you don’t have a job,” and tried to give it back. It was nice, but I made him keep it.

I’ve gotta get my s*** together
‘Cause I can’t live like this forever
You know I’ve come too far
And I don’t want to fail
I got a new computer
And a bright future in sales…
– Fountains of Wayne, BRIGHT FUTURE IN SALES

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art, quotes, writing

No – never.

Ethel. And do you think you will never be able to paint as well as M. Delaroche?
Clive. No – never.
Ethel. And – and – you will never give up painting?
Clive. No – never. That would be like leaving your friend who was poor; or deserting your mistress because you were disappointed about her money. They do those things in the great world, Ethel.
Ethel (with a sigh). Yes.

– W. M. Thackeray, THE NEWCOMES

Chapter 47, in the heart of THE NEWCOMES, which “Contains two or three acts of a little comedy,” is almost entirely done like a play, in dialogue. It was my favorite portion of the entire book. The lovers have escaped from the watchful chaperones and from the author’s digressive narrative, for a very short time. And it was in this chapter, where Ethel asks Clive if he can’t leave art to do something more respectable, something at which he might actually excel, that Clive stands up for himself. He’s not a very good painter, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to quit painting, either. I respected him much more after that.

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a propos of nothing, quotes

wholesome discipline

Ere long, I had reason to congratulate myself on the course of wholesome discipline to which I had thus forced my feelings to submit: thanks to it, I was able to meet subsequent occurrences with a decent calm; which, had they found me unprepared, I should probably have been unequal to maintain, even externally.

– Charlotte Bronte, JANE EYRE

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