Last Lines Shift

"When I teach writing I tell my students that the invisible, unwritten last line of every essay should be and nothing was ever the same again. By which I mean the reader should feel the ground shift, if only a little bit, when he or she comes to the end of the essay. Also, there should be something at stake in the writing of it. Or, better yet, everything."

Cheryl Strayed 

Because that's the sort of thing I'm always saying...

" People are always telling you that change is a good thing. But all they're really saying is that something you didn't want to happen at all... has happened. My store is closing this week. I own a store, did I ever tell you that? It's a lovely store, and in a week it will be something really depressing, like a Baby Gap. Soon, it'll just be a memory. In fact, someone, some foolish person, will probably think it's a tribute to this city, the way it keeps changing on you, the way you can never count on it, or something. I know because that's the sort of thing I'm always saying. But the truth is... I'm heartbroken. I feel as if a part of me has died, and my mother has died all over again, and no one can ever make it right."

You've Got Mail, Nora Ephron

I fell in love the way....

"I fell in love the way I fall asleep: slowly, while reliving every embarrassing thing I've ever done and worrying about things I can't control."

-Emery Lord

All Better Now

"And when my prayers to God were met with indifference, I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance."

-Emily Wing Smith, All Better Now

How Alive and I Willing to Be?

"The business of being a writer is ultimately about asking yourself, how alive am I willing to be?"

-Anne Lamott

Motto Please

"Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences."

-Sylvia Plath

Writing and Teaching

"I hate teaching as much as I love teaching, and I love teaching immensely. But who am I to teach writing? 
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Teaching is the first job I actually care — too much? — about.
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“What if you could just show up?” my therapist asked me when I was complaining about the lackadaisical teenagers in a writing course I was teaching.

“What if you didn’t have to teach them anything?”

“What if you could still be learning and teach at the same time?” she asked.
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On the Amtrak back to Hudson, I pull my students’ pages out of my backpack, sip my wine on ice, and escape into the tragic comfort of their unhappy endings. I draw tiny red hearts above the sentences I love."

-Chloe Caldwell, Major Dramatic Question

The Plainest Weeds

"The fastidious habits of polished life generally incline us to reject, as incapable of interesting us, whatever does not present itself in a graceful shape of its own, and a ready-made suit of ornaments. But some of the plainest weeds become beautiful under the microscope. it is the benevolent provision of nature, that in proportion as you feel the necessity of extracting interest from common things, you are enabled to do so."

Leigh Hunt "On Washerwomen"

The Infinite Suggestiveness

"The essay-writer has no lack of subject-matter. He has the day that is passing over his head; and, if unsatisfied with that, he has the world's six thousand years to depasture his gay or serious humour upon. I idle away my time here, and I am finding new subjects every hour. Everything I see of hear is an essay in bud. The world is everywhere whispering essays, and one need only be the world's amanuensis."

-Alexander Smith, trepverter,l'esprit de l'escalier (The Infinite Suggestiveness)
Taken from Patrick Madden's essay in Quotidiana

Learning to write...

"It is free of verbosity, of ambiguous language gussied up as brilliance. It doesn’t contain any banal insights delivered as revelation. There is no subliminal messaging to the reader about the flattering ways in which the author should be viewed. These omissions are rare ones, especially in personal essays and debut fiction."

Alice Gregory on Marina Keegan

Difference

"A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket." — William Wordsworth

Mad Reason

“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”
—Andre Gide

Syntax

"To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences." — Joan Didion on writing 

Write

"You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely.
It’s far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character’s skin and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into.
I can’t remember how many times I advised students to stop writing the sunny hours and write from where it hurts: ‘No one wants to read polite. It puts them to sleep."
 — Anne Bernays

Notes

Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it."
-Robert Creeley 

Quotidiana

"An essay is the best way to show that everything is connected to everything else."


-Phillip Lopate, editor of The Art of the Personal Essay speaking on Montaigne - regarding the book Quotidiana

http://www.quotidiana.org

Move

"You can't wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club."
-Jack London