#outer

The conflict each day is whether to immerse in books or writing. I can't do one without the other, but I can't do both at the same time. It is the writer's paradox. ↗

— Patricia Hickman

#outer-banks #southern-fiction #inspirational

While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features come tumbling out, the revision is the end of the joy ride. We pull on the gloves and sort of poke around inside the body. Is that a tumor? Will that limb need amputation? I nearly second-guessed myself into heart failure while learning to self-edit. ↗

— Patricia Hickman

#outer-banks #southern-fiction #southern-writers #inspirational

Humans need each other for equilibrium and support. But writers must pull aside to take a quiet walk alone, not just for the sake of serenity but to hear the Voice inside. That is how the storyteller connects with with others--listen, write, share. ↗

— Patricia Hickman

#outer-banks #southern-fiction #southern-writers #inspirational

The central character is an incomplete package of yearning that takes the length of the novel to complete. Completion, though, is not to be confused with perfection. ↗

— Patricia Hickman

#outer-banks #southern-fiction #southern-writers #inspirational

One word I’d use to describe space is lonely. The only way I’ll board a space shuttle is if I had a babysitter with me. You know, to watch the baby I’ll make with her.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#baby #babysitter #describe #description #fornicate

Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless it is the same everywhere. There are businessmen, police up there; people trade, fight, dethrone their kings. Some shooting stars suddenly slid past, describing a course in the sky like the parabola of a monstrous rocket. ‘My Word,’ said Bouvard, ‘look at those worlds disappearing.’ Pecuchet replied: ‘If our world in its turn danced about, the citizens of the stars would be no more impressed than we are now. Ideas like that are rather humbling.’ ‘What is the point of it all?’ ‘Perhaps there isn’t a point.’ ‘Yet…’ and Pecuchet repeated the word two or three times, without finding anything more to say. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#earth #life #outer-space #science #men

The late-afternoon sky, in Paul's peripheral vision, panoramic and mostly unobstructed, appeared rural or suburban, more indicative of forests and fields and lakes—of nature's vast connections, through the air and the soil, to more of itself—than of outer space, which was mostly what Paul thought of when beneath an urban sky, even in daytime, especially in Manhattan, between certain buildings, framing sunless zones of upper atmosphere, as if inviting space down to deoxygenate a city block. ↗

— Tao Lin

#outer-space #nature

A man is not rightly conditioned until he is a happy, healthy, and prosperous being; and happiness, health, and prosperity are the result of a harmonious adjustment of the inner with the outer of the man with his surroundings. ↗

— James Allen

#being #conditioned #happiness #happy #harmonious

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#action #attention #both #cases #choice

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#how #inner #inner world #knowledge #my self