Caitlin Temme

“I went to the library. I looked at the magazines, at the pictures in them. One day I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio.. I sat at a long mahogany table and began to read. All at once my world turned over. The sky fell in. The book held me. The tears came. My heart beat fast. I read until my eyes burned. I took the book home. I read another Anderson. I read and I read, and I was heartsick and lonely and in love with a book, many books, until it came naturally, and I sat there with a pencil and a long tablet, and tried to write, until I felt I could not go on because the words would not come as they did in Anderson, they only came like drops of blood from my heart.”
― John Fante, Dreams from Bunker Hill

“The children will need new stories and fairy tales to see them through their nightmares and daydreams, to transfigure their sorrows and fears at not being able to remain children forever.”
― Keith Donohue, The Stolen Child

“Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don't desert me now. I started to write and I wrote:

The time has come," the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —”
― John Fante, Dreams from Bunker Hill

“Take my advice and live for a long, long time. Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote