Stephanie Schwartz

“So it is written - but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write it over again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“Some words are more than letters on a page, don't you think? They have shape and texture. They are like bullets, full of energy, and when you give one breath you can feel its sharp edge against your lip.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“Decades later, in a magazine I bought from a garage sale as a teenager, Tori Amos said she would've given her arm to have written "A Case of You." I'm always struck by this notion. Any writer who's ever been warned off a man wishes they'd written "A Case of You." But what inspires this particular compliment, this feeling of not just loving a song, or any work of art, but longing to have created it yourself? It happens when you identify so intensely with the work it feels wrong somehow - sad, almost- that is didn't come from your own brain. Like if you had arrived at this expression yourself, you would have more effectively metastasized the emotions that made you love the song so much.”
― Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts

“Words are like stories ... They change as they are passed from mouth to mouth; their meanings stretch or truncate to fit what needs to be said.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words