emma

“Since you have no choice but to begin in uncertainty, you must learn to tolerate uncertainty and, if possible, to turn it into excitement.”
― Stephen Koch, The Modern Library Writer's Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction

“On Keeping a Journal.

Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.

The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Past, present, future - a physicist might say these distinctions are illusions anyway. The human brain is subject to all kinds of misperceptions, and the waking mind not always more attuned to reality than the dreaming one.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view...”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary