#in

Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night. ↗

— Cheryl Strayed

#danger #life #shelter #life

The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers much longer to get there. ↗

— Cheryl Strayed

#quarter-life-crisis #success #twenties #writing #life

For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life? ↗

— W.G. Sebald

#life #meaning #understanding #work #writing

Every time I complete a major project I reward myself with two full days of just reading and coffee! I do justify that it is my work! ↗

— Delia J. Colvin

#paranormal-romance #the-sibylline-oracle #the-symbolon #writing-life #life

The world is big in some ways, and so small in others. ↗

— Ashly Lorenzana

#overwhelming #randomness #universe #world #life

I am incomplete without my work. I am so closely bound to it, so much identified by it, that without it I think I would crumble into dust and drift away. ↗

— Terry Brooks

#writing #life

If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line. ↗

— Baby Halder

#bengali #india #memoir #women #women-writers

Helping your weapon reach your target is easy. Watching someone accept that their life is over before it ever became something is not quite as simple. ↗

— Emm Cole

#merminia #ya-fantasy #ya-paranormal-romance #life

So remember those who win the game Lose the love they sought to gain In debitures of quality and dubious integrity Their small-town eyes will gape at you In dull surprise when payment due Exceeds accounts received at seventeen ↗

— Janis Ian

#life #loneliness #maturity #popularity #youth

These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula. You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborous was that your enthusiasm was excessive. ↗

— Lionel Shriver

#life