Category Archives: for love of words

For love of words IV

15 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in fiction, for love of words, journal, writing

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Below are small excerpts and clippings that I’ve extracted from things I’ve read or re-read recently.

(Posts one, two and three)

“I opened the tattered book.  Its onion-skin pages were stained with grease from his fingers.  On one page, I covered his thumbprint with my thumb and considered for the first time that Papa might have been more than just old pictures-0ld, repeated stories.” -Wally Lamb, I know this much is true

“Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.” -Patti Smith, Just Kids

“He was whittled down now, either to banalities or to simple truths.  Either way, they would have to do.” -Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Later I will look at video made close to that day of the children watching the rapacious hawk, and hear the light tinkling bells in Simon’s voice and think, he was so young that April.” -Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

“When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.” –Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club

“So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood.  We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfillment of childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our essential selves.” -Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

For love of words III

23 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by in fiction, for love of words, quotes, Uncategorized, writing

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Below are small excerpts and clippings that I’ve extracted from things I’ve read or re-read recently.

(posts one and two)

“Experience taught Strike that there was a certain type of woman to whom he was unusually attractive.  Their common characteristics were intelligence and the flickering intensity of badly wired lamps.” -Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

“He looked as though he had been carved out of soft ebony by a master hand that had grown bored with its own expertise, and started to veer towards the grotesque.” -Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo’s Calling

“He could see a new set of muscles hardening in the right forearm of his wife, Teresa, from the constant twisting of oranges on the juicer while their children held up their cups and waited for more.” -Ann Patchett, Commonwealth

“If a man can’t build a violin, he may as well make pizzas in a former violin shop.” -Molly Wizenburg, Delancey

“Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.” -Marilynn Robinson, Home

“But unlike his brothers, Henry had a redeeming attribute.  Two of them, to be exact: he was intelligent, and he was interested in trees.” -Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“For here was the hole in Alma’s theory: she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice.  If the natural world was indeed the sphere of amoral and constant struggle for survival that it appeared to be, and if outcompeting one’s rivals was the key to dominance, adaptation and endurance–then what was one supposed to make, for instance, of someone like her sister Prudence?”   -Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“To see a thing in its proportion, whatever it was, to draw its outlines true and sure and simple–that was bottomless content, which lightened all the world.” -Pearl S. Buck, The Proud Heart

For Love of Words: II

25 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by in fiction, for love of words, Uncategorized, writing

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I enjoyed posting small selections from books I’d read lately here, and now I’ve curated a new selection.

“Thus the neglected idea did what many self-respecting living entities would do in the same circumstance: It hit the road.” -Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

“She didn’t understand the struggles some of us went through.  If you had to write 1500 words you wrote 1500 words.  You put one word then another then another…You didn’t think too much and you didn’t expect too much.” -David Almond, A Song for Ella Grey

-“I feel about our children sometimes the way I used to feel about our tabby cat, Tiny.  I used to look at him blinking slowly in the sun, or lifting his hind foot to chew at his toes with his minuscule front teeth, and I’d think, Why is he even living here with us?  We have so little in common.  The thought was always accompanied by a cresting wave of love.  ‘Our cat! Our dear, strange animal!'” -Catherine Newman, Catastrophic Happiness

-“Every once in awhile in the block, there’s a day that doesn’t start right.  A day when all the repeating patterns that Melanie uses as measuring sticks for her life fail to occur, one after another, and she feels like she’d bobbing around helplessly in the air–a Melanie-shaped ballon.” -M.R.Carey The Girl With All the Talents

-But this new place was other things too… It was ghoulish and ghastly.  It was all things unimagineable.  But Ernest D. was the bravest of explorers.  He battled and brawled until the moon ducked low.” -Joseph Kuefler, Beyond the Pond (Isla’s recommendation)

For Love of Words

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in dear apples, everyday poems, fiction, for love of words, journal, writing

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Below are small excerpts and clippings that I’ve extracted from things I’ve read or re-read recently.

“I could absolutely taste the chocolate, but in drifts and traces, in an unfurling, or an opening, it seemed that my mouth was also filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, tasting a distance I somehow knew was connected to my mother, tasting a crowded sense of her thinking, a spiral, like I could almost even taste the headache that meant she had to take as many aspirins as were necessary, a white dotted line like an ellipsis to her comment: I’m just going to lie down” -Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world” -Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See

“Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was the small and the daily where she’d found life. The hundreds of times she’d dug in the soil of her garden, each time the satisfying chew of spade through soil, so often this action, the pressure and release and rich dirt smell…” -Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.” -Lemony Snicket

“That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing…That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.” -J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful, her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty — a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.” -Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch