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[wondertowords]

[wondertowords]

One thing I’ve never wanted to be, and try to make sure that I’m not, is what I would call a ‘historical tourist.’ I don’t want to be looking around for something interesting to make a poem out of. That should not be the impulse behind a poem. That’s not why you do it. You do it because it haunts you, and you write to discover what it has new to say to you.

Rita Dove, interviewed by Claire Schwartz for Virginia Quarterly Review

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Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.

Maya Angelou

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Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.

Janet Fitch, excerpt from White Oleander

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I’ve learned that home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling.

Cecelia Ahern, Love, Rosie

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See you soon my strange joy, my tender night.

Vladimir Nabokov’s letters to his beloved wife Vera

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All I possess is a body and a soul. And I need something more.

Clarice Lispector, from “Belonging,” Selected Cronicas

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… to belong is to live. I experienced it with the thirst of someone in the desert who avidly drinks the last drops of water from a flask. And then my thirst returns and I find myself walking that same desert.

Clarice Lispector, from “Belonging,” Selected Cronicas

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I am tired of being human. And angry at feeling so much love. Some days I am angry just to be alive.

Clarice Lispector, from “Excess and Privation,” Selected Cronicas

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She was breathing hard, and deep circles of red burned high on her bright cheeks; in all my life I had never seen anyone so maddeningly beautiful as she was at that moment.

Donna Tartt, from The Secret History 

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The terror of being on earth yet longing for heaven.

Clarice Lispector, from “Terror,” Selected Cronicas

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‘You must keep your head up and be prepared to suffer because you are different, so totally different from others. You must accept that you cannot live a bourgeois existence, so when you walk into a room you must hold your head high.’ ‘Even when I enter a room full of people on my own?’ ‘Precisely. You don’t need anyone to accompany you. You should be self-reliant.’

Clarice Lispector, from “Bravado,” Selected Cronicas

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I was offering my soul in exchange for nothing. For it was not peace I felt. I was conscious that my world had crumbled only to leave me standing there, a bewildered, anonymous witness.

Clarice Lispector, from “Almost,” Selected Cronicas

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Hi, I’m a writer. My hobbies include not writing. 

[wondertowords]

“How’s writing going so far?”