El

“no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“It was in the summer that one really lived. Then all the little overcrowded houses were opened wide, and the wind blew through them with sweet, earthy smells of garden-planting. The town looked as if it had just been washed. People were out painting their fences. The cottonwood trees were a-flicker with sticky, yellow little leaves, and the feathery tamarisks were in pink bud. With the warm weather came freedom for everybody. People were dug up, as it were. The very old people, whom one had not seen all winter, came out and sunned themselves in the yard. The double windows were taken off the houses, the tormenting flannels in which children had been encased all winter were put away in boxes, and the youngsters felt a pleasure in the cool cotton things next their skin.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen. Only when a paragraph’s role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work’s ends.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life