#rite

Writers are never fully present because they’re always imagining a different version of the way things are happening; imagining the past in a different way, imagining the present in a different way, imagining the future in a different way. ↗

— Jessica Soffer

#future #past #present #writers #writing

I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#dreams

Don't minimize your dreams and don't lose heart - if I can do this, so can you. It's okay to be scared. Do it anyway. ↗

— Henriette Klause

#dreams

WRITER'S NIGHTMARE" "I felt a grip on my arm that shook my body, forcefully pulling me toward a tunnel of darkness.   The threat of consciousness stole my steady breath. For a moment I believed myself to be under siege; ripped from the sky in mid flight, my wings useless against the monstrous claws shredding my reality. I struggled to remain, to be left alone, aloft.  Reaching with wings that through the power of imagination were suddenly feathered arms, I grabbed at the air.  My hands clutched at something solid.  Wooden.  A desk.  My head spun as I held the furniture, suffering the illusion of falling.   "I was flying," I gasped, realizing suddenly that it had all been a dream. "My best fantasy ever." Lifting my head from its resting spot on the writing desk, I worked mentally to secure the fading images, hoping to capture their essence to memory before they faded away forever.  Bitterness tainted my heart against the hand that had jerked me into sensibility.  Why was I always so callously awakened while doing my best work?  Why not let me dream? ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#imagination #nightmare #richelle #richelle-goodrich #writer

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#shakespeare #writers #writing #art

Sometimes in order for your dream to come true, it is you who need to take the initiative. ↗

— Henriette Klause

#dreams

The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement." [Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech] ↗

— John Steinbeck

#exposure #failures #faults #improvement #writers

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#poets #work #writers #writing #equality

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off. ↗

— William H. Gass

#literary-criticism #living-writers #poetry #prose #equality

I really don't have a lot in common with the people who attend the Comic Con. It's like assuming that all people who write prose are the same. ↗

— Harvey Pekar

#attend #comic #common #con #i