Proper Pauses

Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent? These are high mysteries… There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rule by which writers may shape their course. Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.

— From the chapter “An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders)” of William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style.

22nd May 2009 60 notes

When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn’t matter much to me…. I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life.

— Beautiful Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991), from her essay “My Vocation”.

20th May 2009 6 notes

…[W]riting, when it’s going well, is better than sex; that many delights, unbidden and unpredictable, await on, say, page five or page fifty; that nothing stirs the gut more than a sentence that bends time toward beauty; that the voices you’re to hear will be both scary and irresistible; that, effort by effort, you will improve; that the world, parlous and inchoate and peculiar and difficult, will nonetheless yield up its secrets; that you will be poleaxed by something you didn’t know you knew; that, ironically and necessarily, you will not be satisfied with anything you produce; that, as Gertrude Stein said, you will become only older and different.

— Lee K. Abott, from Letters to a Fiction Writer.

16th May 2009 10 notes

My bed is most perfect at four o'clock in the afternoon, when sunny limbs, dishevelled hair and a thumb lodged in a book is sometimes enough to make me feel like I’m about to fall asleep in exactly the right place.

30th Mar 2009 8 notes

On the same night he said, I’m sorry I can’t do anything to help, he wrote me a long letter. It was about himself, full of helplessness and regret. At the end of the letter he added this: Things deeply felt cannot help but last. He wrote: People cannot always live and love the same way; nothing remains as it was. He wrote: We must change in order to remain the same. And he also wrote this: That is how love must grow. A letter. A very sad word, letter.

— From “Looking for the Elephant” by Jo Kyung Ran. I am still sometimes surprised by how words, arranged just so by someone so far away, can nestle themselves into my brain like a long lost puzzle piece newly found.

15th Mar 2009 6 notes

Maxi party.at my flat thursday night . tanduay poppers vodka you can’t say me no.

— My old Nokia phone miraculously came back to life today, and in it, I found a goldmine of old messages dating back as far as April 2006. This is an SMS I received from a disgustingly handsome Frenchman we used to hang out with, back when we still said things like “hang out”. His arrogance was appalling, and yet, we all knew the awful truth: none of us could say him no, and I have a feeling this is how the whole world secretly feels about the French. And the French know it.

17th Feb 2009 9 notes

Si tú eres la cesta de naranjas / yo soy el cuchillo de sol

— If you are the basket of oranges, I am the knife of the sun. My favorite lines from Octavio Paz’s “Movimiento”. I love it when friends post poems, songs, passages from books they’re reading and put emphasis on their favorite lines: the boldface, underline, italics hinting at so many things. It reminds me of how different words take on different meanings in different minds with different memories. To you, the oranges and knife may not strum any chords, but to me, they sing of long-gone afternoons, in bed, in love, far away.

12th Feb 2009 5 notes

The good thing about writing stories of travel and memory–which, in the end, become the same thing–is that it’s easy to tell whether or not the words came out right.

12th Feb 2009 5 notes

I am glad that you’ve written me. I kiss you.

— The closing lines of an e-mail from a Bulgarian friend. I had almost forgotten how lovely and refreshing imperfect English can be–uncertain, carefully written (A gold star for that perfectly executed contraction!), beautifully awkward. I wish those last three words had really been meant in that way. I kiss you, again and again and again: the sweet, simple beginnings of an erotic love letter that I’m sure I’ve written before and would gladly write again.

5th Feb 2009 5 notes