James Tollefson

“I am seeking whatever is painful in my body, whatever is joyful. While seeking, I may never find myself. While seeking, I have no idea what form I may take or whether anyone, including myself, will ever like what I write. Most of writing feels like walking in the dark. I'm reminded of what Donald Barthelme said: The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do.”
― Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief

“They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.”
― Paul Auster, Moon Palace