Bio's are always difficult for me to write. Do I do a list, a chronology of my life? Do I talk about where I've lived or where I live now? Do I talk about my family, my friends, my education? I'm always worried that I've said too much or worse that I've said nothing at all.
Of all the things that I've done in my life--writing is what helps me to understand life, recognize beauty, process tragedy, and remember all the funny stuff in between.
Quotes I love--(a new one!!!)
Milan Kundera in The Curtain, his chapter entitled, "The Consciousness of Continuity," section called 'The Power of the Pointless," speaking of Flaubert and the editing he did to his second edition of SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION:
"Flaubert made changes...this seemed to me to reveal his deep aesthetic intention: to de-theatricalize the novel; to de-dramatize ("de-balzcize") it; to encolse an action, a gesture, a response within a larger whole; to dissove them into the running water of the everyday...
"The everyday. It is not merely ennui, pointlessness, repetition, triviality: it is beauty as well; for instance, the magical charm of atmospheres, a thing everyone has felt in his own life; a strain of music heard faintly from the next apartment; the wind rattling the windowpane; the monotonous voice of a professor that a lovesick schoolgirl [or boy, smile, my interjection] hears without registering; these trivial circumstances stamp some personal event with an inimitable singularity that dates it and makes it unforgettable.
"One of the most erotic scenes in literature is set off by an utter banality: a silly bore and his dogged chatter. In the theater a great action could only be born of some other great action...The novel alone could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless."
Samuel Beckett
"...nothing else matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile...a stain upon the silence."
Ernest Hemingway
1938, from his self written preface
in a collection of his first 41 short stories:
"In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused."
Sue Monk Kidd, Lilly, from "The Secret Life of Bees":
"He [T.Ray] did not care that I wore clothes I made for myself in home economics class, cotton print shirtwaists with crooked zippers and skirts haning below my knees...I might as well have worn a sign on my back: I AM NOT POPULAR AND I NEVER WILL BE."
Andrea Lee, "Anthropology," in the book "Interesting Women":
"And the whole focus of my life seemed to shift around. At the close of my twenties, as I was beginning to feel unbearably adult, crushed by the responsibilities...[and] here i was offered the brief chance to become a young girl again..."
Zora Neale Hurston, "Their Eyes Were Watching God":
"Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches."
Virginia Woolf from her essay "Philosophy in Fiction":
"...we talk of the advancement of realism and boldly though we assert that life finds its mirror in fiction, the material of life is so difficult to handle and has to be limited and abstracted to such an extent before it can be dealt with by words..."
Toni Morrison,"Beloved," the last paragraph, last lines in the book:
"Sethe," he says, "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow." He leans over and takes her hand. With the other one he touches her face.
"You your best thing, Sethe. You are." His fingers holding are holding hers.
"Me? Me?"
more to come...
tcbswan's Genres: fiction/prose
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