Grab a cup of tea or coffee and relax as you browse a collection of notable quotables and exceptional excerpts, compiled by
Kimn Swenson Gollnick for The Write Place.
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Inspirational Quotes - for writers and others.
Descriptive passages
Inspirational Quotes
"The copy of the writing...was published
to all people." --Esther 8:13
"Establish thou the works of our hands
upon us." --Psalm 90:17
ON BEING A WRITER: "You begin to string words together like
beads to tell a story."
--
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott (c.1994, Pantheon
Books), p. 7
All writers know the mantra, "Write what you know." But writer Sandra Cisneros tells us to
"Write what makes you different." In the helpful writing text,
Write to Learn,
author and writing teacher Donald M. Murray provides this list to help us take inventory of our extraordinary lives:
ON THE "WRITER'S EYE": "You can train yourself to see revealing specifics. A revealing specific
is a detail, fact, quotation, word, phrase that gives off extra meaning. ...Writing seems to ring with authority just because it is specific."
--Donald M. Murray, Write to Learn, p.98.
ON NARRATIVE IN NONFICTION: "We think of narrative as primarily a fiction technique, and when I first started teaching,
narrative was not allowed in freshman English. Yet writing narrative is an essential skill for a nonficiton writer, too. In fact, all effective writing
has an embedded narrative; the reader may not be aware of it, but the implied story keeps the reader's interest and moves the reader forward, toward
the writer's meaning." --Donald M. Murray,
Write to Learn, p.225.
ON WRITER'S BLOCK: "It never gets easier to write. All writers are masters of avoidance.
...some of that avoidance is good. E.B. White reminds us, 'Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer--he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave
on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him.' This waiting is purposeful.... Writers, of course, being writers, are never sure whether they are allowing
their subjects to ripen properly or are just being lazy." Donald Murray's advice? "Write down the reasons you are not writing.
Often when you see the problem you will be able to avoid it. You may realize that your standards are too high, or that you're thinking excessively of
how one person will respond to your piece, or that you're trying to include too much. Once you have defined the problem, you may be able to dispose of it." --Donald M. Murray,
Write to Learn, p.153-154.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR ON WRITING:
"...One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. ...This is the only concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art."
-- "Autobiographical Notes" by James Baldwin, In Depth: Essays for Our Time (c.1993, Thomson Heinle, 2nd edition.), p.65.
"...the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it."
-- "Stranger in the Village" by James Baldwin, In Depth: Essays for Our Time (c.1993, Thomson Heinle, 2nd edition.), p.72.
"I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost."
-- "The Ring of Time" by E.B. White, In Depth: Essays for Our Time (c.1993, Thomson Heinle, 2nd edition.), p.711.
"A woman who writes is a writer by her own definition; but she is a woman writer by others' definitions. (Among these others are, of course, women.) ...The irony, of course, is that while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' ...(Hence the double-edged praise that befalls a woman writer when she is told, by men, that she writes 'like a man.' Which man? I always ask.)"
-- "(Woman) Writer: Theory and Practice" by Joyce Carol Oates, In Depth: Essays for Our Time (c.1993, Thomson Heinle, 2nd edition.), p.509.
Advice about art from a fiction character? Photographer Robert Kincaid tells Francesca, "'That's the problem in earning a living through an art form. You're always dealing with markets, and markets--mass markets--are designed to suit average tastes. That's where the numbers are. That's the reality, I guess.'"
-- The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller (c.1992, Warner Books), p. 51.
"Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. ...The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself."
-- Mao II by Don Delillo (c.1991, Viking Penguin), p. 48.
"But his chief trouble was that he did not know any editors or writers. ...He began to doubt that editors were real men. They seemed cogs in a machine. That was what it was, a machine. He poured his soul into stories, articles, and poems, and entrusted them to the machine. He folded them just so, put the proper stamps inside the long envelope along with the manuscript, sealed the envelope, put more stamps outside, and dropped it into the mailbox. It traveled across the continent, and after a certain lapse of time the postman returned him the manuscript in another long envelope, on the outside of which were the stamps he had enclosed. There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one evenlope to another and stuck on the stamps.
It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot."
-- Martin Eden by Jack London (c.1909, reprinted 1993, Viking Penguin), p.160-161.
"About every once in so often there is a movement to do away with money. [President] Roosevelt tries to spend so much that perhaps money will not exist, communists try to live without money but it never lasts because if you live without money you have to do as the animals do live on what you find each day to eat and that is just the difference the minute you do not do that you have to have money and so everybody has to make up their mind if money is money or if money isn't money and sooner or later they always do decide that money is money." --Gertrude Stein in Everybody's Autobiography (p.42)
J.R.R. Tolkien: "At seven, he wrote his first story about a 'green great dragon.' His mother
told him that one should say 'a great green dragon' instead. He wondered why that had to be so. From the beginning, words
intoxicated him." --On Writers & Writing, compiled by Helen Sheehy & Leslie Stainton (c.1999).
"In my own business of publishing, one watches with growing dismay the ersatz quality of bookmaking, the
vanishing forever of traditional linotype faces, and the degeneration of paper. Over the past few decades, there has been a collapse of the sense of pride in craftmanship,
of the sense of excellence. Usually, this has nothing to do with money. A rough, early Mickey Mouse short--any one of them!--is superior to the animation that is currently
manufactured for television. We are in the dark McDonald's age of the quick and easy." --Maurice Sendak,
Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures
(c.1998, Noonday Press/Farrar Straus and Giroux), p. 117.
"Fiction begins where human knowledge begins--with the senses."
--Flannery O'Connor, quoted in
The Best Writing on Writing, Volume II, edited by Jack Heffron (c.1995, Story Press), p. 199
"Writing a story is like climbing a rock face that has few handholds; you have to be able to
focus a great deal of strength through small muscles, holding on, pushing up while leaning out, almost as if you
were lying on the surface of the sea and trusting it not to take you under, and using your experience and intuition at
once--doing what you know well while discovering as you do it how to work new surfaces."
--A Dangerous Profession: A Book About the Writing Life,
Frederick Busch (c.1998, St. Martin's Press), p. 49
"When you've decided what your characters want and are striving for, you have the conflict
that propels them forward." --Olga Litowinsky,
Writing and Publishing Books for Children in the 1990's
(c.1992, Walker & Co.), p. 59
"There is more treasure in books than in
all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island . . .
and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day."
--Walt Disney (1901 - 1966)
Well begun is half done.
--Aristotle (384-322 BC)
"I don't want lessons, I want practice. I hope it is not pride that makes me so stiff against teaching, but a bad or indifferent teacher is worse than none." --Beatrice Potter, quoted in Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures by Maurice Sendak (c.1998, Noonday Press/Farrar Straus and Giroux), p. 65.
In soloing--as in other
activities--it is far easier to
start something than it is to finish it.
--Amelia Earhart
They may forget what you said, but they will
never forget
how you made them feel.
--Carl W. Buehner
A word is dead
When it is said,
some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
that day.
--Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
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