“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is a proof that humans are capable of magic”
-Carl Sagan
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
“
| — | Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) |
“…Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
Life is full of traps. Some we stumble into unwittingly. Others we set for ourselves without realizing it. Or worse, with full knowledge of what we’re walking into. And still others we were born into, and we may never even recognize them for what they are.
There is one prison, however, in which we are all inmates. We are, all of us, trapped inside out own skins. I’ll never truly know how you see the world, will I? Never know what you really think, how colors look to your eyes, how food tastes in your mouth. It’s a subtle prison, and one we only reinforce by building walls around ourselves. And you can suck it up and try to live with it, or you can spend your whole life looking for a way out only to find yourself right back where you started.
Which do you choose?
Okay, so maybe life is full of traps. Maybe every man is an island. Blah blah blah. Life is also full of things to touch and feel and taste. The problem is… Just because you see something doesn’t mean you’ve got the slightest fucking clue what you’re looking at. So what you do is you turn away from what you don’t understand and you do your best to get cozy where you are. And guess what? You just landed in the next big trap. Lucky you.
Hey, it’s not a perfect world, not by any stretch of the imagination. But at least we’re all in it together, right? Well, not really. See, whet it comes to confinement, the sad truth is… some of us are more trapped than others.
“
| — | Matthew Sturges, Bill Willingham, and Luca Rossi (House of Mystery: Room & Boredom) |
Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that’s where I imagine it - there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.
“
| — | Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore) |
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.
“
| — | Edward Morgan |
I write because I need to write. I write because I am at the bottom of a deep well and I am trying to tell you something. I am trying to make you hear me, to be heard. I am trying to get your attention, because there is this flame inside me and I am trying to tell you about it. I want you to know the fire I feel and the hunger that eats me.
“
| — | Camille Moffatt (Why Write, from A Cup of Comfort for Writers) |
You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.
“
| — | Neil Gaiman |
The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience.
“
| — | Neil Gaiman |
