Dustin Wayne

“Maxims & Other Quotes

If you need an adjective or adverb, you're still fishing for he right noun or verb. 34

Was this a true story? It seemed somehow unimaginable, a fantasy of some kind. But he told it with such conviction that, against my own wishes, I believed him.

Was this indeed the essence of storytelling? Did one simply have to relate a tale in a believable fashion, with the authority of the imagination? 36

Memory is a mirror that may easily shatter. 81

Readers become invisible even to themselves. Only the story lives. It’s the fate of the writer, yes, as well, to disappear. ~ Alastair Reid 83

‘There is only now,’ Borges exclaimed with unstoppable force. ‘Act, dear boy! Do not procrastinate! It’s the worst of sins. I’ve thought about this, you see: the progression toward evil. Murder, this is very bad, a sin. It leads to thievery. And thievery, of course, leads to drunkenness and Sabbath-breaking. And Sabbath-breaking leads to incivility and at last procrastination. A slippery slope into the pit!’ 98

Borges: I no longer need to save face. This is one of the benefits of extreme age. Nothing matters much, and very little matters at all. 100

Borges: Believe me, you will one day read Don Quixote with a profound sense of recollection. This happens when you read a classic. It finds you where you have been. 102

Parini: I try not to think of the phallus, except when I can think of nothing else, which is most of the time.
Borges: This is the fate of young men, a limited focus. One of the few advantages of my blindness has been that I no longer focus my eyes on objects of arousal. I look inward now, though the mind has mountains, dangerous cliffs. 105

Borges: Writers are always pirates, marauding, taking whatever pleases them from others, shaping these stolen goods to our purposes. Writers feed off the corpses of those who passed before them, their precursors. On the other hand they invent their precursors. They create them in their own image, as God did with man.108

Borges: Nobody can teach you anything. That’s the first truth. We teach ourselves. 115

Borges: One should avoid strong emotion, especially when it interferes with the work at hand. We have European blood in our veins, you and I. Mine is northern blood. We’re cold people, you see. Warriors. 125

Borges: The influence of Quixote was such that Sancho acquired a taste for literary wisdom. Such wisdom in his aphorisms! ‘One can find a remedy for everything but death.’ Or this: ‘Make yourself into honey and the flies will devour you.’ 151
Borges: You see, I designed my work for the tiniest audience, ‘fit company though few.’ A writer’s imagination should not be diluted by crowds! 151

Borges: If you don’t abandon the spirit, the spirit will not abandon you. 181”
― Jay Parini, Borges and Me: An Encounter

“What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“To put it another way: having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best I could only ever hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shit-hill labeled “Saunders Mountain.”

“Hmm,” I thought. “It’s so little. And it’s a shit-hill.”

Then again, that was my name on it.

This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.

What we have to do at that point, I think, is go over, sheepishly but boldly, and stand on our shit-hill, and hope it will grow.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Why do I know I exist if I also know I will not?”
― Cărtărescu Mircea