Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
Home, home, home
That night as I lay in bed waiting for sleep, I heard a howl from deep in the woods. It rose like a song until I was sure it was all I could ever want to sing. It went on and on and all I could think of was home, home, home.
~ Wolfsong, TJ Klune
Instinct and will
“Do not abandon yourself altogether either to instinct or to will. Instinct is a siren, will a despot. Be neither the slave of your impulses and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract and general plan; be open to what life brings from within and without, and welcome the unforeseen; but give to your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan.”
~ Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Inducement
“I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves.”
“I wonder, Madam,” replied the Doctor, “that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
~ Samuel L. Johnson
Candy for the soul
If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers … becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul.
— David Foster Wallace
Welcome the New Year
And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.
— Rilke
A step beyond
Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.
~ SFWA Grand Master Samuel R. Delany
The secret locked within
The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.
~ Stephen King
The illusion of permanence
“I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend…I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don’t last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend…”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives
Strangeness
Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked.
~ John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist