The best advice on writing I’ve ever received is to take it seriously, because to do it well is all-consuming.
I’d rather know I can trust you. So before you read what’s in that thing, tell me a story that squares with its details and exonerate yourself in my eyes. Tell me the story you should have told the sheriff right off the bat, when it wasn’t too late, when the truth might still have given you your freedom. When the truth might have done you some good.
He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband’s death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence – something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it burrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it.
The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred.
I have been trying to think clearly about everything and to use all this distance to advantage. And here is what I’ve discovered. I don’t love you, Ishmael.
The bottom line was that he didn’t want to die. As far as he was concerned, death was the problem. The basic human problem. Everyone’s problem. He wasn’t any different from anyone else, but there was no consolation in that.
It ate at whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it.
You’ve been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you’re someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy.
There were guys who prayed at Tarawa,′ said Ishmael. ‘They still got killed, Mother. Just like the guys who didn’t pray. It didn’t matter either way.
The trick was to live here without hating yourself because all around you was hatred. The trick was to refuse to allow your pain to prevent you from living honorably.
To acclimate students to misery under the rubric that so doing prepares them for life is a cynical notion – and a horrifying one.
The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.
The place felt sinister, though. Your imagination can get the better of you where a road ends against a forest.
Everybody knows what God is,′ said his mother. ‘You feel what God is, don’t you?
The prospect of death in autumn, she said, was irrelevant next to its happy recognition of its participation in the life of the tree itself.
People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids.
Well, I think it’s extraordinarily fun to write, and I look forward to it every day, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s easy. There’s a difference between the two. It’s fun in the way all worthwhile things are fun – there’s difficulty attached to it. I think that a writer has to accept a certain amount of frustration. It’s inherent in the task, and you have to simply persevere. It’s part of the definition of the work.
I merely wish to point out that in the face of such a world you have only yourselves to rely on. You have only the decision you must make, each of you, alone. And will you contribute to the indifferent forces that ceaselessly conspire toward injustice? Or will you stand up against this endless tide and in the face of it be truly human?
He told himself he had never felt so happy, and he felt a sort of ache that this was happening and would never again happen in just this way no matter how long he lived.
Let us so live in this trying time that when it is all over we can look one another in the eye with the knowledge that we have behaved honourably and fairly.
Tourists reminded him of other places and elicited in him a prodding doubt that living here was what he wanted.