readers-and-writers - Tumblr blog

[readers-and-writers]

Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.

Susan Orlean, “The Library Book”

[readers-and-writers]

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

[readers-and-writers]

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel

[readers-and-writers]

And leafing through old books we sometimes find A dark, oracular phrase is underlined. You once were here, but in time out of mind.

Rainer Maria Rilke, "Improvisations of the Caprisian Winter"

[readers-and-writers]

Books keep stupidity at bay. And vain hopes. And vain men. They undress you with love, strength and knowledge. It’s love from within.

Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop

[readers-and-writers]

why from this her and him did you and did i climb (crazily kissing)till into themselves we fell-- how have all time and space bowed to immortal us if in one little bed she and he lie(undead)

e.e. cummings, 95 Poems

[readers-and-writers]

let's,from some loud unworld's most rightful wrong climbing, my love(till mountains speak the truth) enter a cloverish silence of thrushsong

e.e. cummings, 95 Poems

[readers-and-writers]

An unfinished meaning was forming between us, propelling us forward. Consoled for a moment, I imagined out group's frenetic dancing as the heart of some massive body, pumping its warmth into the cold forest, to the trees waiting, wise beyond knowing.

Wayne Scott, "Once More to Breitenbush"

[readers-and-writers]

She loves the house and, even more, she loves the Island. It's infused with a vibrant, brooding, humid life; it makes her feel that everything--even the water, even the stones--is alive and aware, and her along with it.

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

[readers-and-writers]

There is no rival like an absent one.

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

[readers-and-writers]

In the end she discovers what she's always wanted to know: she is bigger inside than out.

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

[readers-and-writers]

A fence, he'd been told, would show fear.

J.A. Bernstein, "Reserve"

[readers-and-writers]

It's a kind of love to conserve, to hold back certain things.

Gina Ochsner, "Gin Ridge"

[readers-and-writers]

It's like a miracle, he said, how one thing can become another.

Gina Ochsner, "Gin Ridge"

[readers-and-writers]

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

[readers-and-writers]

That's what makes a view so sad, and so beautiful. It'll be there when we're not.

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

[readers-and-writers]

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me...To understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children