Emilie Autumn
“You,” he said, “are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain. ― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls (The Asylum Emporium; 2nd edition, January 1, 2011)
Category: Biography
Donald Miller
… fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life. — Donald Miller, A Million Miles In a Thousand Years ( Thomas Nelson Inc; 33265th edition, January 1, 2009)
William Alexander Percy
The good die when they should live, the evil live when they should die; heroes perish and cowards escape; noble efforts do not succeed because they are noble, and wickedness is consumed in its own nature. Looking at truth is not at first a heartening experience–it becomes so, if at all, only with time, with… Continue reading William Alexander Percy
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Under the blistering day he walked towards the night; and under the ice of the naked stars he longed for the return of day. Happy are the lands of the North whose seasons are poets, the summer composing a legend of snow, the winter a tale of sun. Sad the tropics, where in the sweating-room… Continue reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
T.S. Eliot
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair. — T.S. Eliot, from “La Figlia che Piange,” quoted in The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon (Virago Press, 2022)
Frederick Buechner
It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of… Continue reading Frederick Buechner
James Salter
A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page. — James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection (Knopf Doubleday, 2011)
Ben Whishaw
A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is a experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to… Continue reading Ben Whishaw
Jean-Dominique Bauby
I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. — Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. (Vintage June 23, 1998)
Rebecca Solnit
As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state. What is vivid in the writing is not in how it hits the senses but what it does in… Continue reading Rebecca Solnit
The Vale of Soul-Making 