All Quotes By Tag: Writing
“Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God?”
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“The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.”
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“When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn’t otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.”
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“Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don’t imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.”
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“As a writer of philosophy, it’s good to ask oneself, ‘Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?”
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“I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it – from The Gulag Archipelago”
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“I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives?So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we’ll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.”
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“Take each day in your open palms and close your fists around it. This life is not done with you yet.”
“All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.”
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“You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.”
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“Life is so beautiful and so short that anything that makes me feel less than too much is nothing at all.”
“My heart’s scripture tastes foreign in the mouths of cowards and on the tongues of those who have never breathed inthe moon and breathed out the world.”
“Love is wind for the soul”
“A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil’s defense and god’s accusations. The guards at the king’s heart let him in. The writer can be anything and any one he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates.”
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“It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.”
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