Jennifer > Jennifer's Quotes

“Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own aristocratic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.”
― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

“We don’t even survive in the memories of the living. Science has destroyed that myth. Whenever we remember something, what we’re doing is remembering the last time we remembered it; our memory doesn’t go back to the original notch, the first one was cut, but to the last one. Human memory is virtual, like that of a computer. When we open a file we’re not opening it as it was when we first created it, but as it was the last time we used it. It is called hypercathexis and is our brain’s most sophisticated recourse when it comes to confronting pain.”
― Enrique de Hériz, LIES

“…nostalgia is, by definition, the least authentic of all feelings.”
― Enrique de Hériz, LIES

“Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli

“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth

“Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli

“Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli

“There are no days more full than those we go back to.”
― Colum McCann, Zoli

“Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain to her that whoever suppresses fiction destroys life, and that everything disappears with it, all love, all desire. If the past is an invention, it’s not such a big deal. After all, the future’s an invention, and no one finds that hard to accept.”
― Enrique de Hériz, LIES

“All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.”
― Philip Roth

“If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in doing so, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Death is always on its way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life....we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times...How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet is all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd Series

“Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation. ”
― Mark Twain

“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”
― Edna Ferber

“Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past. ”
― J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

“Writing is the geometry of the soul. ”
― Plato

“Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind. ”
― V.S. Pritchett

“What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret. ”
― Gail Sher

“First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
― Cecil Day Lewis

“A truly good book…teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. When I read an indifferent book, it seems the best thing I can do, but the inspiring volume hardly leaves me leisure to finish its latter pages. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read…What I began by reading I must finish by acting.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.”
― Azar Nafisi

“A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.”
― Azar Nafisi

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”
― Henry David Thoreau