"Blunt advice for beginning writers: You are not interesting. The world is interesting. You happen to live in the world. Explore it."

- Dinty Moore

"to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumples like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again."

- Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is” (Mules of Love, BOA, 2002)

(Source: gammasandgerunds)

"True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world."

- David Foster Wallace

"Before you quit, try."

- Ernest Hemingway. (via dearantarctica /  blua)

"My battles as a writer are battles with that part of myself that thinks I’m supposed to sound like T.S. Eliot when I grew up in East Texas. I wanted to sound lofty and British and to say ‘indeed’. That’s not how I am. The best thing about me is that I’m warm. The book should be that way, too, right? That’s something I can do better. I can do warm better than Don DeLillo. That’s not what he does. He does another thing."

- Mary Karr (via thebronzemedal / steampoweredmedia)

"What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw."

- William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

"

First of all:
I am tired.
I am true of heart!

And also:
You are tired.
You are true of heart!

"

- Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius