J.R. Tompkins > Quotes

“I do so much writing. But so much of it never goes anywhere, never sees any light of day. I suppose that's like gardening in the basement. I don't publish so much of what I write. I just seem to plow it back into the soil of what I write after it, rewriting and rewriting, thinking that somehow it gets better after the fifty-second-time around. I need to learn to abandon my writing. To let go of it. Dispose of it, like tissue.”
― J.R. Tompkins

“Writing is a lifelong disease.

Once contracted, the only prescription is to write constantly in whatever form to express your condition, in whatever construction to carry your words beyond you.”
― J.R. Tompkins

“What would it be like to feel so attached, so intrinsically bonded, so protective of one’s own best connection with time and the ages, of generations past and future, of another human life, of their time?”
― J.R. Tompkins, Price of the Child

“History doesn’t move you more than when it’s in the iron of your own blood.”
― J.R. Tompkins

“One can only hope that our horizons widen as we grow taller.”
― J.R. Tompkins

“There was something magical in his completely uninhibited amusement, something right in his utter abandon. It was a glow within him, as if he were translucent, at play with light itself. She somehow felt a peace with the world she had been missing before. She wondered if this was a glow Savio saw in his daughters. Antoníto stopped to look for her and sent up a big wave. This is joy, she thought.”
― J.R. Tompkins, The Gardens of Marguerite

“She bent and placed a single daisy upon the grave. A simple white daisy. The plainest of flowers, perhaps the purest, Elspeth thought. It had cost next to nothing at all, and perhaps that was the point. She wasn’t being cheap. She was being symbolic. In her mind, Andrea deserved only the unstained purity of the simplest of daisies, a daisy that was unsoiled by a wealth that couldn’t find the money to have claimed her soul.”
― J.R. Tompkins

“Antoníto clucked and clicked his arms in mimicry of a clock. When its human hands reached straight out, time stopped. There he lay absolutely still, a cruciform putto on sand angel wings, staring at a Michelangelo sky.”
― J.R. Tompkins, The Gardens of Marguerite

“Great flocks of raindrops swelled and folded, and fell upon her like insects to a feast. She hadn’t thought to bring a raincoat; she was not well-prepared, and she hated that. Her mind seemed as stirred, dark and brooding, as the coffee-colored clouds.”
― J.R. Tompkins, The Gardens of Marguerite

“Anyway, I think we coalesce out of the ether, acquiesce into droplets of god, grow upright from the earth, and become arrogant. We live our lives in blissful ignorance of where we come from, but ultimately we owe our selves back to the earth.”
― J.R. Tompkins, The Gardens of Marguerite