I hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
No Promises.
"I can't explain what I mean.
And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it."
J.D. Salinger, Catcher In The Rye
Posts tagged lit:
It really was such a shame, the way you could be so careful, and for so long, and then go ahead and undo it all in the end, as though nothing had ever been held together by anything at all.
—Johanna Skibsrud, This Will Be Difficult to Explain: And Other Stories
It is not so much a question of forgetting Peeta as remembering the others.
—Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.
—George Bernard Shaw, You Never Can Tell
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
—George Bernard Shaw, The Irrational Knot
It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.
— Kurt Vonnegut, on Censorship
Lessons for writing, by C.S. Lewis
What really matters is:–
1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”
5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
If trouble comes when you least expect it, then maybe the thing to do is always expect it.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road
“I missed him. Love, I realized, is something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.”
—Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
Ask me Anything Archive Mobile Playlist
Centennial Theme by Each & Every. Powered by Tumblr.
