Jacek

“But after they had prayed they could not eat anything because the sea water had spoiled their food. The Holy One, blessed be He, salted the Leviathan for the end of days when it will be eaten, and the sea has been left full of salt.”
― S.Y. Agnon, Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town and Other Novellas

“He took the cigar out of his mouth and said, "Those people had God in their hearts."
I said to him in a whisper, "God exists now too."
"But not within us," he said.
I said to him: "A certain hasidic master was asked where the Holy One, blessed be He, dwells. He told them: Wherever He is allowed to enter, there He dwells.”
― S.Y. Agnon, A Book that Was Lost: and Other Stories

“The poet Gary Snyder’s finely unpoetic image of composting is useful here. Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day every day, a lot of garbage, leftovers, dead leaves, eyes of potatoes, artichoke stems, forests, streets, rooms in slums, mountain ranges, voices, screams, dreams, whispers, smells, blows, eyes, gaits, gestures, the touch of a hand, a whistle in the night, the slant of light on the wall of a child’s room, a fin in a waste of waters. All this stuff goes down into the novelist’s personal compost bin, where it combines, recombines, changes; gets dark, mulchy, fertile, turns into ground. A seed falls into it, the ground nourishes the seed with the richness that went into it, and something grows. But what grows isn’t an artichoke stem and a potato eye and a gesture. It’s a new thing, a new whole. It’s made up.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

“[T]he early diary proves retrospectively to be not only a laboratory for self-exploration but a technical testing-ground for the future writer of fiction. Indeed, for someone with literary ambitions, the two impulses are hard to separate: fictional invention itself is another vehicle of self-knowledge, a way of recasting one's experience under the camouflage of fabulation; and, correspondingly, even so scrupulous an effort to observe what one had undergone as we find in Fogel's diary is also on some level a playing with the possibility of turning it into literature.”
― Robert Alter, Hebrew and Modernity