Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
I talk about the things people have always talked about in stories: pain, hate, truth, courage, destiny, friendship, responsibility, growing old, growing up, falling in love, all of these things. What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrous. I want to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.
She was illusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.
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Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)
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A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader’s soul.
My attitude on writing has always been threefold. Any fictional work you read should be able to take you away from reality one paragraph at a time. You should be able to have an emotional response to the story or characters completely regardless of whether you have known that feeling before or not. And, it should be good for you. If that’s by teaching you something, making you think, or just taking you away from other situations in life that trouble you.
The first two items I can strive for, the third is primarily up to you, the reader. But what they can do is let you be another person, a character, as you hear their thoughts and say their words. They can make you laugh, tug your heart, and give you a little vacation.
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Isis CW (my favorite Gundam Wing fanfic writer)
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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel…it is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
With my paint box at home, I can make every color imaginable. Pink. As pale as a baby’s skin. Or as deep as rhubarb. Green like spring grass. Blue that shimmers like ice on water. One time, I spent three days mixing paint until I found the right shade for sunlight on white fur. You see, I kept thinking it was yellow, but it was much more than that. Layers of all sorts of color. One by one. I haven’t figured out a rainbow yet. They come so quickly and leave so soon. I never have enough time to capture them. Just a bit of blue here or purple there. And then they fade away again. Back into the air…
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Peeta Mellark (Catching Fire)
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Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.
Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.
Maybe there’s a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we’ve ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we’re an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we’re still hard-wired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we’re all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying again—each of us playing our parts in the other’s plotlines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it.
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Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
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I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That’s right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that’s kind of perverted or maybe it’s just romantic and highly intelligent.
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie)
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I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
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Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
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There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
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Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
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Just as composers go to concerts and artists visit galleries, writers read. You will learn, in the most enjoyable way, more about style and language from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops and how-to books.
