How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
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"You don't write for prizes. You write because this is the way you are most alive, the way you feel you can be most effective in confronting life and society —and yourself even.
The imagination sometimes takes off, takes off just like, say, a jazz musician who is on a flight of improvisation.
So I let it go where it wants to go and then I pare it down. It's better to have it all down than to have missed an opportunity of writing yourself into something startling and interesting."
—Ralph Ellison
Your writing is writing you.
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"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
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Through writing, I feel power for maybe the first time in my life. I don't have to say somebody else's words. I can write my own. I can be myself for once. I like the privacy of it. Nobody's watching. Nobody's judging. Nobody's weighing in . . . Just me and the page. Writing is the opposite of performing to me. Performing feels inherently fake. Writing feels inherently real.
Jennette McCurdy, I’m Glad My Mom Died
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Everyone wants to tell the truth, and everyone recognizes that to juxtapose two sentences is necessarily to tell a lie, to tell less than one knows, to distort the situation, cut off its ambiguities and so its possibilities. To write with style is to fight lying all the way…To tell something, really tell it, takes a certain kind of moral hardness.
joan didion, in ‘questions about the new fiction’, quoted in deborah nelson’s tough enough
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Me estoy hundiendo y ahogando por una persona que está bien sin mi.
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Acceptance, The Southern Reach Trilogy, Jeff Vandermeer
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We keep moving forward, opening
up new doors and doing new things,
because we’re curious and curiosity
keeps leading us down new paths.
https://sharpwittedquotes.com/
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Damn I forgot how much I love writing. To get lost in the world I've created with characters I love more than people I know in real life. To have every thought invaded with new ideas as I try to navigate through daily life. To run scenarios and scenes in my head when I am forced to be away from my computer. To imagine my characters in real life situations and try to determine how they would react. To feel as they feel To blow my own mind when I come up with a plot twist that would make my readers hate or love me. To control a world by the smallest detail when I have hardly any control in my real world. To forget, even just for a little while, that the life I'm living isn't actually mine.
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I have kept my feelings safe in the eyes, I can't dare to shed them off in mere tears and lose out the essence it brings to me, and the music it plays in my heart.
- trustonlystars | Jannie F.
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Sure," said Aven, "because the Winter King no longer needed him. He said as much. I say we just kill him and spare ourselves the trouble of watching our backs."
"Seconded," said Charles.
"Kind of bloodthirsty, don't you think, Charles?" said John.
"I'm an editor," said Charles. "I have to make decisions like that all the time.
James Owen, p132, Here There Be Dragons (bk 1, Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica)
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One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time…Something more will arise later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
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“Write to see what is hidden in your centre, what sleeps in the pit of your belly.”
—yrsa daley ward
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Photographs are magical, just by glancing at them, they put us in endless ride of memories we've lived.
- krutsthetic
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A quote on my dark academic aesthetic wall
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Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't give up! Even if no salvation comes, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
franz kafka, in a diary entry from 1912. translated by ross benjamin
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