Annie Dillard
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. ― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (Harper Perennial, November 12, 2013)
Category: Memoir
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
Truman Capote
As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes. — Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, first published in 1956)
Charles Simic
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other. ― Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs ( University of Michigan Press, February 15th 1995) Originally published 1995.
Ernest Hemingway
When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good… Continue reading Ernest Hemingway
Rebecca Solnit
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the… Continue reading Rebecca Solnit
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)
Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Sidgwick and Jackson (January 1, 1945)
Sarah Manguso
The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear. — Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. (Graywolf Press; 1St Edition edition March 3, 2015)
Joan Didion
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember. — Joan Didion, Blue Nights. (Knopf; First Edition edition November 1, 2011)
The Vale of Soul-Making 