“Do you know how the animals got their tails? How the lesser gods came into the world? The longer this goddess lives, the more she shakes her tail—or pulls on it with all her strength.” – Diane Williams, “How Blown Up”
Category: Lit & Crit
“The person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last.” – John Williams, Stoner
What is it good forWhat is it good for
“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.” – John Williams, Stoner
Playing with matchesPlaying with matches
“Memory is an arsonist, setting fires cell-deep at ungovernable intervals of time and space. Lights go on, searching out pain. The hands of another. The mother voice, singing to block out the noise. Titanic laughter and with it confusion. Clouds, white, grey striations, disposed across the eye. The folded heron in the reed bed, the river drifting deeply, its world mirroring still.” – David Hayden, “Wonder Meadow”
AnythingAnything
“If you don’t look out the window, you forget what is worth seeing. A person could get used to anything.” – Michael J. Seidlinger, “Every Time You’re Alone: An Incomplete List”
Snapped in two like a pencilSnapped in two like a pencil
“All the hours, all the days, the months in figurative seclusion, all the sentences written that’ll never be read, and all the books published that’ll never reach any more than a handful. And yet it’s still in the act of solitude that I look to make a connection, to be something other than alone. There’s something so broken about it, but look, I’m still here. I’m writing in the darkness of a room, shortly after dusk.” – Michael J. Seidlinger, “Every Time You’re Alone: An Incomplete List”
Ask Julius, he knowsAsk Julius, he knows
“Every plot has room for an assassin or two.” – Deb Olin Unferth, “Your Character”
Life as we know itLife as we know it
“In seeking to survive and yet to retain the authenticity existing at parturition one will either be killed or go mad, if not one will constantly be on the run.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)
Consider it a giftConsider it a gift
“To be boundless to the point of forgetting one’s existence cannot be acquired.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)
Unless it’s mass murder, to pick an example at randomUnless it’s mass murder, to pick an example at random
“Not having a goal is a goal, the act of searching itself turns into a sort of goal, and the object of the search is irrelevant.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)
And that’s why we do itAnd that’s why we do it
“Philosophy in the end is an intellectual game. At limits unattainable by mathematics and the empirical sciences, it constructs all sorts of intricate structures. And as a structure is completed, the game ends. Fiction is different from philosophy because it is the product of sensory perceptions. If a futile self-made signifier is saturated in a solution of lust and at a particular time transforms into a living cell capable of multiplying and growing, it is much more interesting than games of the intellect.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)
It’s right thereIt’s right there
“The road stretches endlessly and there is always a point where the sky and earth meet, but the road just crawls over it.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)
Especially having to apologize for it laterEspecially having to apologize for it later
“It’s what musicians do when they don’t know what to do anymore. They take out a wineglass or a handkerchief and try to play their cellos with that. Or they rub a balloon and tell people that this is their new instrument. Or they hang on to the bow and toss the cello, and they play their bow on the radiator or piano or a piece of wood. They make a sliding or scratching sound and this is their new music. Or artists, they do it too. They put away their pads and pull stuff out of the garbage. They’ve been doing that for so long, it’s unnerving—this little segment of the population going around, saying that they see art everywhere: trash bin, mountain, sidewalk, plank, person, disease. Some people find it almost annoying.” – Deb Olin Unferth, “Abandon Normal Instruments”
Reach out and touch itReach out and touch it
“Non-existence exists so there is non-existence of existence; non-existence of existence exists so there is non-existence of non-existence.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)
Just as well him as anotherJust as well him as another
“Let’s call it love—you don’t deserve it, you’ve known all along, but then somebody as misguided and hopeless as you are shows up and you think: maybe.” – Kimberly King Parsons, “Wisdom to Know the Difference”
Please don’t talk about love tonightPlease don’t talk about love tonight
“There’s a reason people in foodwork stay up late, drinking and drugging. Your shift ends and hours later you’re still sweating from those burners, amped up and pissed at whichever customer or coworker screwed you the hardest.” – Kimberly King Parsons, “Wisdom to Know the Difference”
Your choice, manYour choice, man
“If you think she is beautiful she will be beautiful, if there is evil in your heart you will only see demons.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)
Sign me upSign me up
“Who doesn’t want to go down in the annals of history and moreover be able to draw advance overtime payments as well as a writer’s fee?” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)
Onward, through the fogOnward, through the fog
“If they understand anything, writers know that the world is not characterized by absolute clarity.” – Ben Yagoda, About Town
Deus ex machinaDeus ex machina
“Nuclear energy insists on global government, on law, on order, and on the willingness of the community to take the responsibility for the acts of the individual.” – E. B. White, The New Yorker, August 18, 1945
Would you like fries with thatWould you like fries with that
“The fisherman hauls his nets, tiring his body in the very act of shielding it from starvation; the starving fish takes the bait, its very need for life condemning it to death. Just how much can a man profit in this world; how much can a little fish consume? Each feels the same about existence, each treasures life. Further, the woodsman sweating on the hillside, who returns at evening bearing the north wind at his back, the limping seller plying his trade through the fields, who sets out at dawn through the thick white dew—their work may differ but for all, the sufferings of this life are one.” – Anonymous Monk, “Journey Along the Sea Road” (trans. Meredith McKinney)
The call of the museThe call of the muse
“There are no empty hopes. But knowing what to hope for is steady work. What was ever so important to you you left your daily life to heed it?” – Joanna Klink, “The Infinities”
The thing to doThe thing to do
“If you’ve ever been in a fight with someone you love,
each of you holding the pistol of your dignity
to the other’s temple, despite, or maybe
because of, the width and breadth of that love,
which has you pretty sure you’ve been mistaken
for her father, while she’s fairly certain
she’s again found someone like her mother,
so she’s haunted by her blindness, and you’re
sick of her projections, and just as someone’s
about to say the next perfect thing—perfect
for deepening this unfathomable trench—
it might be a good time to get up and leave
saying, ‘I need to check on the cornbread.’ “
– Diana Goetsch, “Whole Lotta Love”
It’s nice when they’re connectedIt’s nice when they’re connected
“Intelligence is the ability to solve a problem, to decipher a riddle, to master a set of facts. Judgment is the ability to orbit a problem or a set of facts and see it as it might be seen through other eyes, by observers with different biases, motives, and backgrounds.” – James Comey, A Higher Loyalty
Starts out that wayStarts out that way
“Modern man is not immoral because he is irreligious; he is irreligious because he is immoral.” Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and Politics
When she looks at you, it’s not that wayWhen she looks at you, it’s not that way
“There is no female equivalent to the male gaze.” – Diana Goetsch (interviewed by Alan C. Fox and Asha Fox in Rattle 58, Winter 2017)
How special, you’re a writerHow special, you’re a writer
“Writing isn’t a precious thing and I’m not in eternal search of keeping what I do holy or built up out of shimmering gems. I don’t eat my lunch off a gold plated lunch truck. The great American novel doesn’t know it’s the great American novel until it’s been out almost a hundred years and the woman or man who wrote it is dead. Who cares about the great American novel while we’re in the golden age of TV? Art isn’t something you should protect from yourself. Just run towards it full sprint and embrace how ridiculous your ideas are, how unguarded, how close to something a child might think up, lying on their back in a field overgrown with weeds. The sights and sounds of the rotating world revealing itself to you, or not. Take a sip of black gas station quality coffee, take a bite of fish sandwich, write down the adventures of the day. Every day adds up. Every lunch break is something more than a lunch break.” – Bud Smith, Work
Not much to choose fromNot much to choose from
“Choosing the lesser evil
is choosing evil.”
– Behzad Molavi, X
Be careful or you’ll be a writerBe careful or you’ll be a writer
“The most ordinary movements in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.” – Virginia Woolf, Orlando
A rare findA rare find
“What you hope for, from a person sitting next to you on a train, is that he will be thin and will not smell.” – Lydia Davis, “Excerpts from a 1985 Diary”