Elizabeth Percer > Quotes

“Every morning in San Francisco was a bit like waking up on the edge of the earth: beautiful and damp and wild, full of the strange music people make, open-armed, into the wind.”
― Elizabeth Percer, All Stories Are Love Stories

“His information was multifaceted, almost colorful. Had he not delivered it with such impassivity, spinning on his backless chair as if he were at the center of some odd carousel - we the horses, each with our own rigid purpose: names for me, numbers for my father, promises for my mother - it would have been a speech worth remembering.”
― Elizabeth Percer, An Uncommon Education

“I realized that the more and more frustrated I became, the more and more I tried anew to tackle my writing, the less it gave me. And an amazing truth began to bubble to the surface. It was this: the harder I worked at my writing instead of with it, the more it would back away from me. Creative writing doesn’t want to be worked at, just as cakes don’t want you opening the oven door on them all the time, or animals don’t want you harassing them into submission, or children don’t want you to force feed them the rules for growth. You can bake a cake or tame an animal or raise a child under these circumstances, but it will emerge tragically deflated, a poor approximation of what it might have been.”
― Elizabeth Percer