#writing

Holy and pure are the drops that fall, When the young bride goes from her father's hall; She goes unto love yet untried and new— She parts from love which hath still been true. ↗

— Martha Finley

#beauty

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring. ↗

— Richard Powers

#change

Humor, drama, romance, whatever genre of entertainment you create or consume is only effective if it is challenging to your sensibilities. When the sexuality of seeing a woman’s ankles became trumped by her calf, society changed. When the calf was later trumped by a woman offering shots of alcohol from her vagina on Rock of Love, society changed again. My hope for this world is that we can soon run out of shocking body parts and can finally see the humor in our ætheric bodies. ↗

— Christy Leigh Stewart

#change

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#death

Write as though your life depended on it. ↗

— Jill Telford

#life #life-changing #writing #writing-advice #change

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? ↗

— Theodor W. Adorno

#futility #god #writing #communication

There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our work to be recognized, but that is not the reason we write. We do not write because we must; we always have a choice. We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate. We communicate to connect, to know community. ↗

— Bell Hooks

#writing-life #communication

Write what you know. Write what you can't forget. Write to give yourself courage and others hope. ↗

— Nikki Rosen

#courage #forget #hope #remember #write

If you’re dating a writer and they don’t write about you — whether it’s good or bad — then they don’t love you. They just don’t. Writers fall in love with the people we find inspiring. ↗

— Jamie Anne Royce

#royce #writers #writing #dating

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#grammar #mortality #nouns #writing #death