This might be a bit long, but I love it. From Wendell Berry:
Always in big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.
You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place. It is an experience of our essential loneliness, for nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.
When I get discouraged about writing I turn to Jimmy Baldwin:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
"That girl in the photo isn’t one solid person, feet set solidly in one irrevocable life; that girl is an illusive firework-burst made of light reflecting off a million different possibilities."
From Tana French "The Secret Place"
If you wrote that, you would either take the rest of the day/month off or keep writing forever.
This passage from Lawrence Durrell’s Justine has haunted me for decades. “I remember once being made aware that she was sharing in her mind a thought which had just presented itself to mine, namely: ‘This intimacy should go no further, for we have already exhausted all its possibilities in our respective imaginations: and what we shall end by discovering, behind the darkly woven colors of sensuality, will be a friendship so profound that we shall become bondsmen forever.’”
This morning I read a sentence on meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg's Instagram page: What if it all works out? With so many horrible awful terrible no-good things all around me, it's a reminder that there is still hope that something good to happen to any one at any given time. that's my hope for all of us today.
"The presence of one person crowded the room, two people choked it." Damn, Paul Auster.
And you wrote a good one in your memoir, in the spirit of this letter, that I love: "Every day we sit down to work we swim in a sea of our own fuck-ups. On the shore is one good sentence."
My favorite quote EVER is Rilke's: "I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are 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."
"First, I got myself born." Demon fucking Copperhead. Barbara Kingsolver really did that. It's my favorite first sentence.
I have kept with me a sentence that you wrote in an earlier post:
Something you write today may change someone's life.
Such is the power of writing.
Ahh that’s so nice!
i bear witness to no thing
more human than hate
i bear witness to no thing
more human than love
From Lucille Clifton’s Rosh Hashanah
This might be a bit long, but I love it. From Wendell Berry:
Always in big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.
You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place. It is an experience of our essential loneliness, for nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.
It’s no use crying over spilt milk when all the forces in the universe were bent on spilling it.
Somerset Maugham.
Perspective giving, IMVHO
"Our job forever and always was to refuse apocalypse in all its forms, and work cheerfully against it." - Leif Enger, "I Cheerfully Refuse."
Just read that one a year or two ago, but it's stuck in me good.
When I get discouraged about writing I turn to Jimmy Baldwin:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin
"That girl in the photo isn’t one solid person, feet set solidly in one irrevocable life; that girl is an illusive firework-burst made of light reflecting off a million different possibilities."
From Tana French "The Secret Place"
If you wrote that, you would either take the rest of the day/month off or keep writing forever.
Incredible.
Incredible. That's for sure.
This passage from Lawrence Durrell’s Justine has haunted me for decades. “I remember once being made aware that she was sharing in her mind a thought which had just presented itself to mine, namely: ‘This intimacy should go no further, for we have already exhausted all its possibilities in our respective imaginations: and what we shall end by discovering, behind the darkly woven colors of sensuality, will be a friendship so profound that we shall become bondsmen forever.’”
This morning I read a sentence on meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg's Instagram page: What if it all works out? With so many horrible awful terrible no-good things all around me, it's a reminder that there is still hope that something good to happen to any one at any given time. that's my hope for all of us today.
ooh I love that sentence! And all your sentiments, too.
"The presence of one person crowded the room, two people choked it." Damn, Paul Auster.
And you wrote a good one in your memoir, in the spirit of this letter, that I love: "Every day we sit down to work we swim in a sea of our own fuck-ups. On the shore is one good sentence."
We swim in a sea of our own fuck-ups. That is a line to remember as we try to reach those open blue waters!
RIP Auster!
My favorite quote EVER is Rilke's: "I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are 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."
Definitely a contender! Love Rilke. Live the questions.
Beautiful. I have carried your sentences with me, especially as I work towards my endings and teach others about writing.
Here’s one, “It has become clear to me that I’m always writing to a faint point of light.”
Gorgeous. Inspiring. A map.
<3
“Ever try? Ever fail? Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett
Those words sit on top of both a hopeful and a grim reality.
That is Beckett in a nutshell- hopeful and grim.