Idella Horseford > Idella's Quotes

“The sunset bled into the edges of the village. Smoke curled out of the cottage chimney like a crooked finger.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“Soft skin warm against his nose, her pulse beating strong against his cheek, suddenly clear thinking and being the voice of reason were concepts as foreign as a different language.”
― Lotchie Burton, Gabriel's Fire

“This faulty light fitting at the front door with the dangerously flickering bulb looks rather festive. Who says I don't do Christmas?”
― R.D. Ronald

“While not unappetizing, the food was too spicy. Not to mention, there were things on her plate that she didn’t recognize and was not prepared to eat.”
― Alyssa Hall, And Then I Heard the Quiet

“Awakened to the crow of a rooster almost old enough to retire to a cooking pot.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Steel Blood

“Marco opened the walkway gate just as a sprightly grey lizard skittered across the stone path. A bougainvillea vine laden with a riot of purple blooms scaled the right side of the house, and the heady scent of gardenias saturated the air.”
― Margarita Barresi, A Delicate Marriage

“(there is no pepper on the table; evidently pepper perks the libido),”
― Tom Hillman, Digging for God

“The artillery fire which helped in holding off the enemy advance against the Australian positions appeared to be getting always closer. A radio operator called Vic Grice somehow replaced the antenna on Buick’s radio. That had been shot off, thus rendering the radio in-operational.”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

“You can be a natural athlete with terrible work habits, and that ends up wasting your gifts.”
― Vernon Davis, Playing Ball: Life Lessons from My Journey to the Super Bowl and Beyond

“To feel one’s self, to be conscious of one’s personality, is the lot of an eye inflamed by a cinder, or an infected finger, or a bad tooth. A healthy eye, or finger, or tooth is not felt; it is nonexistent, as it were. Is it not clear, then, that consciousness of oneself is a sickness? Apparently”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“The Road not Taken

[...]
I shall be telling this with a sigh
somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference...”
― Robert Frost

“there was a sort of embarrassment about storytelling that struck home powerfully about one hundred years ago, at the beginning of modernism. We see a similar reaction in painting and in music. It's a preoccupation suddenly with the surface rather than the depth. So you get, for example, Picasso and Braque making all kinds of experiments with the actual surface of the painting. That becomes the interesting thing, much more interesting than the thing depicted, which is just an old newspaper, a glass of wine, something like that. In music, the Second Viennese School becomes very interested in what happens when the surface, the diatonic structure of the keys breaks down, and we look at the notes themselves in a sort of tone row, instead of concentrating on things like tunes, which are sort of further in, if you like. That happened, of course, in literature, too, with such great works as James Joyce's Ulysses, which is all about, really, how it's told. Not so much about what happens, which is a pretty banal event in a banal man's life. It's about how it's told. The surface suddenly became passionately interesting to artists in every field about a hundred years ago.

In the field of literature, story retreated. The books we talked about just now, Middlemarch, Bleak House, Vanity Fair -- their authors were the great storytellers as well as the great artists. After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's..."

So there was a great split that took place. Story retreated, as it were, into genre fiction-into crime fiction, into science fiction, into romantic fiction-whereas the high-art literary people went another way.

Children's books held onto the story, because children are rarely interested in surfaces in that sort of way. They're interested in what-happened and what-happened next. I found it a great discipline, when I was writing The Golden Compass and other books, to think that there were some children in the audience. I put it like that because I don't say I write for children. I find it hard to understand how some writers can say with great confidence, "Oh, I write for fourth grade children" or "I write for boys of 12 or 13." How do they know? I don't know. I would rather consider myself in the rather romantic position of the old storyteller in the marketplace: you sit down on your little bit of carpet with your hat upturned in front of you, and you start to tell a story. Your interest really is not in excluding people and saying to some of them, "No, you can't come, because it's just for so-and-so." My interest as a storyteller is to have as big an audience as possible. That will include children, I hope, and it will include adults, I hope. If dogs and horses want to stop and listen, they're welcome as well.”
― Philip Pullman

“Times and scenes like that put Janie to thinking about the inside state of her marriage. Time came when she fought back with her tongue as best she could, but it didn’t do her any good. It just made Joe do more. He wanted her submission and he’d keep on fighting until he felt he had it. So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again. So she put something in there to represent the spirit like a Virgin Mary image in a church. The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in. It was a place where she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired. She wasn’t petal-open anymore with him.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God