“you must write every single day of your life … . you must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads … . may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. and out of that love, remake a world” - zen in the art of writing, ray bradbury
(via books-and-coffee-lover)
“and now the old story has begun to write itself over there … isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” - o pioneers!, willa cather
(via grayskymorning)
“for it would seem— her case proved it— that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. the nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.” - orlando, virginia woolf
(via bluebirds-fly)
“when writers die they become books, which is, after all, not to bad an incarnation.” - jorge luis borges
(via booklover)
ruminations on how writers are so frequently drinkers
“if i knew words enough i could write you the longest love-letter in the world— and never get tired.” - head and shoulders, f scott fitzgerald
(via gonorthwriteaway)
“maybe i’ve done a very bad thing in sitting down to write; there is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonourable.” the adolescent, fyodor dostoyevsky
(via misswallflower)
“personally i think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. when you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you’ve said or read or written a fine sentence. you can recognize a well-turned phrase or an elegant style. but when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. when you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, see it quite naked, in a way. and that’s where it becomes wonderful…” - the elegance of the hedgehog, muriel barbery
“and like everything else this strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls. if only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.” - to the lighthouse, virginia woolf
(via booklover)
(via colleenie)
“my fingers obsessively wrote the name of my beloved up and down my arm or in my hand or on my knee. if i wrote his name a million times on my body, i believed he would kiss me … his name held for me the sacred resonance of those old testament words written in fire by an invisible hand. mene, mene, teckel, upharsin. i could not say his name aloud. i could only write it on my skin with my fingers without cease.” - the plague of doves, louise erdrich
(via gatheringkindling)
“when i got older i decided i wanted to be a real writer. i tried to write about real things. i wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.” - the history of love, nicole krauss
(via soverypretty)
