The Sentence That Changed Your Life
Hi friends.
You know what day it is, and you know what you need to do today—if you haven’t done it already. It is an “anything is possible” day. That’s how I’m looking at it. That’s my most optimistic take on it.
I was looking for inspiration through possibilities all weekend and I found it. The incredible art triennial Prospect 6 (curated by geniuses Ebony G. Patterson and Miranda Lash) opened on Thursday. I consumed so much art for days. There was a lot to love. Everything was so forward-facing and conversational and electric and challenging and political and also quite gorgeous.
You never know what’s going to change your life. I felt a little shifted afterward.
The shows are installed in multiple venues over town but I most admired the physical space of the Ford Motor Plant, which had to be extensively renovated for this show. How did the curators know this place would eventually be the perfect place to display these amazing artists? They just did. They saw the possibilities.
I’ve watched my friends involved with Prospect work so hard these last two years. What a fucking joy to see them succeed. Certainly we were living in an art bubble this weekend. I felt the art taking care of me. I needed it, and it fed me, and I was grateful for it.
Yesterday morning I was thinking about great sentences that have changed my life. Ada Limon was in town this weekend, too, to see art, and also to give a reading last night, which was packed and incredible. Hundreds of people out to see a poet on a Monday night.
One more moment of being fed by the art.
I always return to Ada’s poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl” when I am seeking inspiration and a sense of calm, especially those last four lines:
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.
When I sit down to write I don’t ever think: today I will write a sentence that could change someone’s life. But I like knowing that it’s a possibility—for any of us! That it’s part of the power of this work that we’re doing. This thing where we’re just messing around with a pen and a paper and daydreaming and imagining, and that it could someday make a difference in someone’s morning or day or for the rest of their forever? What a gift. What a comfort. All from one line.
Yesterday I asked some of my writer friends what some of their favorite lines from other writers or thinkers. Ones that calmed them or made them feel hopeful or inspired, and I’ll let that carry you into this day and week.
From Alex Chee:
“Finally, never give up on yourself. Then you will never give up on others.” —Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart
From Megan Abbott:
“All you have to do—and watch this carefully, please—is keep writing. So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.” — Shirley Jackson, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings
From Deesha Philyaw:
“No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” — Zora Neale Hurston, from her 1928 essay, “How It Feels to be Colored Me”
From Laura van den Berg:
“Art is where what we survive survives.” —Kaveh Akbar, The Palace
From Emma Eisenberg:
“For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who—one word—love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. Between the two worlds he was suspended.”—Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
From Antoine Wilson:
“We must admit that there will be music despite everything.”—Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense”
From Maurice Ruffin:
“Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”—Toni Morrison, Beloved
From Megan Giddings:
“The feeling was now stronger than before; he felt even less capable than before of understanding the meaning of death, and its inevitability appeared still more horrible to him, but now thanks to his wife's nearness, the feeling did not drive him to despair: in spite of death, he felt the necessity to live and love. He felt that love saved him from despair and that under the threat of despair this love was becoming still stronger and purer.”—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I am leaving the comments open today in case you have a favorite sentence or two you want to share.
See you on the other side.
Jami
You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on twitter and instagram.
“I just know that whenever I’m at my most distracted or stressed out, if I can make just a little time to scratch a few things down, I always feel better afterward. Because my feelings will have been held for a moment, captured and examined, seen in a new light. Writing allows us to see ourselves when we most feel lost or consumed by the world.”
-Jami Attenberg
I have this quote taped to the inside of my journal and it has been revolutionary to my mindset and motivation.
Both of mine come from Tim O'Brien's brilliant book "The Things They Carried":
“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried