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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #novel
A mysterious ability, a broken promise, a life changed forever... ↗
#novels #page-turner-beach-read #romance #women-s-fiction #change
I had this guy’s file pulled this morning, along with the rest of your neighbors. His name is Desperado.” Pause. A few seconds passed. He was waiting for my reaction. “Did you say Desperado?” I couldn’t stop the snort of laughter that bubbled to the surface. “Yeah,” the Director confirmed. “He changed his name when he turned eighteen. It was Melvin.” I was still laughing. “’Cause Desperado is so much better than Melvin. ↗
I shot up out of my chair. “Change of plans. Finish your drink so we can go.” Jay responded flatly, “Go where exactly?” “I’m not sure but we’ll know it when we see it.” He looked at his glass and back to me. “Why bother?” I looked him the eye, seeing pain there and forcing myself not to flinch from it. “Because pity parties suck” I started walking toward the exit and over my shoulder asked “You coming?” He downed the rest of his drink and followed me out the door. ↗
When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism. The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them. In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void. Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned. ↗
#creativity #inspiration #novel #poem #poetry
And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre ↗
