Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write.
— Sir Philip Sidney
(My Muse was apparently channeling Mr. T.)
Who loves ya, baby?
“There’s something very soothing about hanging out with people who know all about your faults and like you just fine anyway.”
~ Maggie Stiefvater
Maggie Stiefvater improves your life
Here is a way to improve your life: Everywhere you see the word “margarine,” replace it with “butter.”
– Maggie Stiefvater, on Twitter
Everywhere you see the word “low fat,” apply judicious strikethrough to the letters L and O and W.
Also, I give you full permission to compare the nutrition facts of your granola bar with cookies and forevermore eat cookies for breakfast.
Justice and Physics
Angie hurled her entire body at me. She wasn’t a very large person, but justice and physics were on her side.
~ Maggie Stiefvater, SINNER
It’s a serious responsibility
“As a writing man, I have felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment.”
~ E.B. White
Raymond Chandler. Elegant Prose.
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.
~ Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
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
The nature of movies
“Movies are more than a commodity. Movies are to our civilization what dreams and ideals are to individual lives: They express the mystery and help define the nature of who we are and what we are becoming.”
— Frank Pierson
(screenwriter: Cool Hand Luke)
WORK those words!
“There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
— Dorothy Parker
The nature of fairy tales
Fairy tales are “… a counter-history, a ceaselessly whispered assertion of truths that cannot be reached by the straight and narrow road of realism. You can travel that road as long as you like, and certainly the sights to be seen along it are splendid. But it cannot take you where it does not go.”
~ Laura Miller, “Jean Thompson’s ‘The Witch: And Other Tales Re-told’ “, New York Times Book Review, October 24, 2014