Brian Beatty > Brian's Quotes

“Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.”
― Nelson Algren

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can’t be spoken in words alone. At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.”
― Alan Garner

“When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.”
― Sam Shepard

“My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.”
― Jim Harrison, Songs of Unreason

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“The life of comparison is deadly. One is always more than or less than and it is based upon a brief proof which tends to be seen as emotional but is in fact bereft of emotion. Comparison is so subtle a force it exposes itself in the guise of emotion to protect its own cunning from being seen as the judgmental emphasis it is.”
― Michael Burkard, My Secret Boat: A Notebook of Prose and Poems

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“The rich flow of creativity, innovation, and almost musical complexity we are looking for in a fulfilled work life cannot be reached through trying or working harder. The medium for the soul, it seems, must be the message. The river down which we raft is made up of the same substance as the great sea of our destination. It is an ever-moving, firsthand creative engagement with life and with others that completes itself simply by being itself. This kind of approach must be seen as the "great art" of working in order to live, of remembering what is most important in the order of priorities and what place we occupy in a much greater story than the one our job description defines. Other "great arts," such as poetry, can remind and embolden us to this end. Whatever we choose to do, the stakes are very high. With a little more care, a little more courage, and, above all, a little more soul, our lives can be so easily discovered and celebrated in work, and not, as now, squandered and lost in its shadow.”
― David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

“Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.”
― David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

“It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with, it is the mother of the thing you fear. The very thing that has given birth to the nightmare.”
― David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

“The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
― Ken Kesey

“Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“I'm white and I don't dance, but that doesn't mean I have all the answers.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

“Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's part of any endeavour, not just writing.”
― Roddy Doyle

“I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
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― Jonathan Lethem

“Music ultimately left him unstirred. Like a god irritated with his own tinkerings. Despite his talent, or perhaps because of it, he heard only the machinery, the clanking and spitting. He felt nothing. No compassion.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.”
― Thomas McGuane, Nobody's Angel