Friday QuoteDay

“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”

— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Friday QuoteDay

“The only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet.”

― Nikos Kazantzakis, Greek novelist

Friday QuoteDay

“Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Friday QuoteDay

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” 

― Ray Bradbury, American author, from Zen in the Art of Writing

 

Friday QuoteDay

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

― Louise Erdrich, Native American author, from The Painted Drum LP

Friday QuoteDay

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.” 

 — Aldous Huxley, English writer, author of Brave New World

 

Weekly Flâneur: A Thousand Eyes

Image of a cherry tree covered in blossoms. Click to enlarge.

"The Night Has A Thousand Eyes" 

by Francis William Bourdillon

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying of the sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

Cherry tree at midnight, downtown Charlotte, N.C., Spring 2013

Saturday QuoteDay

“The model for tomorrow, and this is the model I’ve been using with enormous enthusiasm since I started blogging back in 2001, is to try everything. Make mistakes. Surprise ourselves. Try anything else. Fail. Fail better. And succeed in ways we never would have imagined a year or a week ago.” 

— Neil Gaiman, on blogging. 

(Previous Mr. Gaiman quotes here, here and here!) 

Weekly Flâneur: Book It

Click to enlarge.

The Main Library of Uptown Charlotte has featured a multitude of literary quotes on its outer columns since 1996. (Though the building itself has been around as long as I can remember. And I remember being kicked out of Main as a small child for being rowdy* with a friend in the late 1980s, so that's at least 20 years. They let me back in. Eventually.) It's a lovely way to enjoy some light outdoor reading on a lunch break from the skyscrapers that dwarf the building, before heading inside to grab a book on hold or wander the stacks.

Since I missed both Weekly Flâneur and Friday QuoteDay last week due to travel, I'd like to think that a photo of a quote can make up for it? What say you, dear friends? All smiles and forgiveness, or will you take your flaneuring needs elsewhere? (Kidding, I know you'll stay here with me forever! BBFFs, best blog friends 4eva!)

Mr. B is fond of Groucho Marx's quote, and so one recent night out on the town I snapped this pic. The first shot I took was without a flash, which ironically made the photo ... too dark to read. All the quotes can be found here.

"Outside of a dog, a book is probably man's best friend, and inside a dog, it's too dark to read." Groucho Marx

The bonus side quote reads:

"The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it from you." B.B. King

And hidden behind them both is this quote:

"One of the greatest gifts adults can give – to their offspring and to society – is to read to children." Carl Sagan

Let's all go take a blanket outside to the newly sprung grass and read a book in the sunshine. Don't wake me if I fall asleep. See you there.

*Well, not so much rowdy. More like a champion of justice. Another child stole my friend Katie's purse, containing a prized $2 bill inside, so I tackled him while she punched. We were in full Brownie Troop uniform. The attending librarian who found two girl scouts sitting on a boy's chest and beating him took pity on the thief and hauled us out of the kid's section and straight to the troop leaders, who happened to be our mothers. Sorry, Mom/Scout Leader!

Friday QuoteDay

Today is the first audio Friday QuoteDay at FitC, starring none other than Neil Gaiman, giving short advice to aspiring artists in the best way possible. (Oppa Gaiman Style!)

A young woman asks if she should pursue her dream to be an artist (a director) or if there are enough artists in the world. Mr. Gaiman gives her a heartfelt answer that includes this gem: "None of them are you. None of them are going to change people and change the world in the way you can change it."

Show and Tell

Time to kill the darlings. This is an excerpt from a story I am working on that will not make the cut. Maybe. Maybe not.

But here's a snug little home for these poor words on FitC.

Today, the sensation of sleeping while someone else is speaking.

Do you know it? It’s a half-dream, the sheets and pillows speaking, the voices weaving into the unconscious, becoinge part of the dream, part of the movements of the mind. The voices speaking aren’t real, and yet they are, but you, you deep dreamer, cannot tell the difference.

It is your mother’s voice coming from the lips of painted, narrow boat. The next door neighbor's shout becomes the thing of wings, bright and fearsome. The television droning now a companion in lucid wanderings. The voices that are heard not as yourself, but as a sleeper. I hear them often; they drift under doors to me, the sound of footsteps, of chatter, of laughter. When they come I stir, just a bit, not knowing who they belong to or where they come from. Wanting them to be silent. Sleep, always sleep, is the final solution to the girl you see in this bed.

The day rose, foggy, grey, with little difference between night and dawn. We were cold; the sheeps' moss bedding wasn’t fully dried. The still-green vines were hollow with water and absorbed the moist air under my stiff body. Never sleep on damp moss. It’s not as comfortable as it looks. The night before we grabbed it in sharp handfuls, hung it over the fire to dry out, smoke, but it wasn't hung long enough before our tired bodies claimed the moss for bedding.

I moan. A pert voice responds.

"Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey!"

To be continued?

Friday QuoteDay

“There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.”

— Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

 

Friday QuoteDay

“I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to note that women, from a young age, are required to consider the reality of the opposite gender’s consciousness in a way that men aren’t. This isn’t to say that women don’t often misunderstand, mistreat, and stereotype men, both in literature and in life. But on a basic level, functioning in society requires that women register that men are fully conscious; it is not really possible for a woman to throw up her hands and write men off as eternally unknowable space aliens — and even if she says she has, she cannot really behave as though she has. 
Every element of her life — from reading books about boys and men to writing papers about the motivations of male characters to being attentive to her own safety to navigating most any institutional or professional or economic sphere — demands an ironclad familiarity with, and belief in, the idea that men really are fully human entities. And no matter how many men come to the same conclusions about women, the structure of society simply does not demand so strenuously that they do so. 
If you didn’t really deep down believe that women were, in general, exactly as conscious as you, you could probably still get by in life. 
You could probably still get a book deal. You could probably still get elected to office.”

— Jennifer duBois, Writing Across Gender

Friday QuoteDay Bonus

"A year, ten years from now, I'll remember this; not why, only that we were here like this, together."

— Adrienne Rich

 This quote is so simplistic and relatable in its beauty. I'm thrilled to share it with you, and hope that we will continue to walk together for years to come.

Friday QuoteDay

"You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it." 

— Adrienne Rich, American writer, feminist, activist

Via the New York Times:

Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.

Friday QuoteDay

“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty one and even twenty three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”

— Joan Didion, Goodbye To All That, 1968.

Indeed

Via Etsy seller Gayana, and available for purchase.

 "Happiness is a cup of coffee and a good book."

Good Advice

Nic Alderton, "How To Write A Novel."

Be sure to click the link to find out how to write a really great novel.

Witty Blog Title Referencing Creative Writing

"Includes fascinating portrayals of casual drug use at house parties, how the author/protagonist had conversations about post-punk while seeing his mate’s band perform at some shitty small venue, internal monologues about consumerism while observing people in a mall and that time when the protagonist had an epiphany about living in the moment while walking in the rain"

-- Via Dinu Lippatti's Bones

You know this guy.  Even if you didn't know him personally through your education, you've sat next to him in Starbucks. Or possibly read one of his meandering online explanations of his body of work that is full of obscure-but-not-really references. Or, you've heard of James Franco and his new novel. Like the above, with more money.

Bonus! A previously published James Franco story included these great lines:

"His window is all the way down, and he breathes his smoke out the black gaping gap."

Gaping ... gap.

"The building is beige, but the shadows make it shadow-color."

So, gray, then? Yeah.

The More You Know

Found via Fiction Writers Review

It's a delicious smell for a reason!