Angel Lemke

“In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?'" The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he likes sentences he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.'" The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabour it), is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.”
― Stanley Fish

“There is a moment following tragedy that some people never get to experience. You have to be ready for it or it will crush you to dust. It's like a window flung open and naked to the day. It's like being lifted away. It's like being stranded with everything you need. It's the moment you call a cornfield beautiful because you mean it, because you've never seen the world like this before, because newness no longer strikes terror but rather brings hope. You jerk awake into it like meeting yourself on a blind date. You surrender to that sudden first rush of joy without consequence, no more doom or fear or guilt, surrender to the sheer devastating presence of life, huge and indifferent, pushing into you like God's breath.”
― Sung Yim

“When you’re not sure where you’re going or what’s really important to you, you’ll never know when enough is enough.”
― David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

“I composed balanced sentences and periodic sentences and practiced, till I was blue in the face, the English department adage, Vary your sentence structure. Amazingly enough, having a mix of long and short sentences, along with topic-body-conclusion paragraph structure, did not automatically make my prose interesting.”
― Douglas Glover, Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing