Bill FromPA

“As he always did before retiring, so tonight he pulled out a drawer of his night table and took from it a small black ledger in which he wrote down the day's expenditures in a script so small that he could have written the Lord's Prayer on the heads of pins with it.”
― Ludwig Bemelmans, Dirty Eddie

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“The pie he put on a shelf over the oven, and he unpacked a fruit salad that looked as if the remains of a lot of Old Fashioneds had been spilled into a wooden bowl.”
― Ludwig Bemelmans, Dirty Eddie

“I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit to a good grace of its hazards...But he has one compensation, Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale