#w

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

ليس لنا أن نتطلع إلى هدفٍ يلوح لنا باهتاً من بعد ، وإنما علينا أن ننجز ما بين أيدينا من عمل واضح بيِّن. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#clear #goal #life #work #life

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman. ↗

— Antonia Fraser

#empowerment #feminism #gender #history #independence

I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high-- don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby. ↗

— Darin Strauss

#embarrassment #high-school #life

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant. ↗

— Louis L'Amour

#writing-craft #writing-life #life

If you never try, you'll never know what you are capable of. ↗

— John Barrow

#know #never #try #you

It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#life

Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life. Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble. ↗

— David Mitchell

#peace #utopia #war #life

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes. So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#war #life