Stephanie

“The elephant, the huge old beast,’ it began, ‘is slow to mate.’ They wait ‘for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts slowly, slowly to rouse.’ I wasn’t an elephant. My heart had never been slow. I tore it up.”
― Lily King, Heart the Lover

“By mid-November I’ve written twelve stories. We choose five for the thesis and begin to revise. Revision for me in the past has been some light polishing. This is more like a root canal on every paragraph. The writing professors I’ve had before often spoke in generalities, in quotes by famous writers. Chekhov said. Beckett said. And we scribbled down those pearls. Dr. Felske only talks about what she sees on the page. She taps her silver mechanical pencil on a passage. What is truer here? She steers me away from the Southern gothic plots I was enamored with last year and encourages me to write from my own emotions. I start to understand the power of fiction, the reason we make things up. My best story is about my father. It’s not autobiographical. It’s about the manager of a shoe store and the high school boy who gets a job there—but it is about my father, about my rage and shame and love for him. These scenes that didn’t happen concentrate and distill the emotion of what did. ‘The truth has nothing to do with the facts,’ one of my professors said Faulkner said. Professor Felske shows me what that really means.”
― Lily King, Heart the Lover

“And still,' I write, 'there is this sense that I could express it all in just one nonexistent word, and you would understand exactly what I mean.”
― Lily King, Heart the Lover

“not one good deed but the habit of goodness.”
― Lily King, Heart the Lover