#writ

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#writing #life

We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely...When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing. ↗

— Anaïs Nin

#life

Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life: it is a comprehensive response to life. ↗

— Gregory McDonald

#life

It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#writing #life

The writer's life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody's fault. You chose it. ↗

— Bill Barich

#life

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey. ↗

— John Updike

#life #writing #inspirational

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#writing #life

I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged. ↗

— Koren Zailckas

#emotions #families #family #family-therapy #memoir

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing. ↗

— Hélène Cixous

#writing #life

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#writing-advice #writing-craft #writing-life #writing-process #life