At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake.
Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.
It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.
Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.
When we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we’ve never crossed before.
We broke the world to make it whole...
It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
Who knows a man’s name, holds that man’s life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.
I’ve got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin’s not easy.
Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone.
I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.
But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.
A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer’s job is to be its medium.
When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.