Drew > Drew's Quotes

“Push words.
Pull light.
Carry balm.”
― Drew Myron

“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“We still & always want waking.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“The situation is grave: the way we lean over each other, the way years later we emerge: hunchbacked, hooded, with full grown tender things called souls.”
― Olena Kalytiak Davis, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing

“Unless you are silent, you will not
know your urgent heart, how it beats
between the thin skin of yes and no.”
― Drew Myron, Thin Skin

“You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.”
― Charles Baxter, El festín del amor

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
― Anne Lamott

“Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, "Well, that's pretty much what I thought I'd see," you are in trouble. At that point you have to ask yourself why you are even here. [...] Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

“Last night your thin walls invited me to the party next door / reminded me I am a quiet person in a quiet life.”
― Drew Myron, Thin Skin

“Memory, when it juts, retreats, recovers, shows us how to hold the darkness, how to breathe.”
― Drew Myron, Thin Skin

“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.”
― Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres

“Twitter," said Manny, waving his hand. "You know what that is? Termites with microphones.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“If the work comes to the artist and says, 'Here I am, serve me,' then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist's talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, 'Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake'.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Within & Without: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1939-1944

“The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Open your heart. Someone will come. Someone will come for you. But first you must open your heart.”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

“It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Am I supposed to do something
important?
It doesn't seem enough
to merely take up space
on this planet
in this country
in this state
in this town
in this family.”
― Sharon Creech, Heartbeat

“There was nothing in life harder or more important than agreeing every morning to stay the course, to go back to your forgotten self of so many years ago, and to make the same decision. Marriages, like ships, needed steering, and steady hands at the wheel.”
― Emma Straub, The Vacationers

“It is not so much a matter of traveling as of getting away; which of us has not some pain to dull, or some yoke to cast off? —GEORGE SAND, Winter in Majorca”
― Emma Straub, The Vacationers

“Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”
― W.S. Merwin

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
― Pico Iyer

“Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”
― Pico Iyer

“How clumsily we love this world:
looking into that vast darkness,
waiting for the telescope
to send down unseen colors of light.”
― Julia B. Levine

“Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. ... She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.”
― Penelope Lively, How It All Began

“Tina nods sagely and says yes and then something in Plautdietsch, probably something like heck yeah do we ever know what sad is. Sadness is what holds our bones in place.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“Sadness is what holds our bones in place.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows