Jason Holloway

“What makes it is when you go over the whole piece each day from the start to where you go on from rewriting it really and then going on. Even then the actual writing is probably only about an hour and a half. Of course lots of times you can’t write but nearly always you do. Each day you throw away what turned out to be shit in the stuff you did the day before.”
― Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961

“Thus Milton refines the question down to a matter of faith," said Coleridge, bringing the lecture to a close, "and a kind of faith more independent, autonomous - more truly strong, as a matter of fact - than the Puritans really sought. Faith, he tells us, is not an exotic bloom to be laboriously maintained by the exclusion of most aspects of the day to day world, nor a useful delusion to be supported by sophistries and half-truths like a child's belief in Father Christmas - not, in short, a prudently unregarded adherence to a constructed creed; but rather must be, if anything, a clear-eyed recognition of the patterns and tendencies, to be found in every piece of the world's fabric, which are the lineaments of God. This is why religion can only be advice and clarification, and cannot carry any spurs of enforcement - for only belief and behavior that is independently arrived at, and then chosen, can be praised or blamed. This being the case, it can be seen as a criminal abridgement of a person's rights willfully to keep him in ignorance of any facts - no piece can be judged inadmissible, for the more stones, both bright and dark, that are added to the mosaic, the clearer is our picture of God.”
― Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates

“When in doubt—reconnoitre. It doesn’t do the damnedest bit of good but it gives you time to think, and anyhow French words look and sound splendid in all military contexts.”
― Berkley Mather, The Pass Beyond Kashmir

“When in doubt—reconnoitre. It doesn’t do the damnedest bit of good but it gives you time to think, and anyhow French words look and sound splendid in all military contexts.” There was possibly a fallacy in his theory because he was eventually killed by a booby-trap while reconnoitring a brothel in Rangoon—but I decided to follow his advice.”
― Berkley Mather, The Pass Beyond Kashmir