Category Archives: Quotes

Changing the geography

I like watching a cut heal, how the scar tissue forms, changing the geography of what was there before, how slowly the wound closes until new skin grows over and eventually, there’s only a thin white scar and the tissue beneath it to remind you that something bloody and gaping had once been there.

—Roxane Gay

I love them as sort of fetish objects

The crux of this whole thing with ‘The Sentimentalists’ is: what’s a book? Is it that fancy artisanal piece that (Gaspereau publisher) Andrew Steeves and company makes, or is it the words [Johanna Skibsrud] wrote, regardless of the delivery methods? I still buy physical books too. Sometimes there are books that … I’m going to want on my shelf. But I’m running out of space in my house and most of the time it’s about reading – it’s not so much about the physical object, although I love them as sort of fetish objects.

—Joan Langevin Levack

This is the thing: people seem to have this belief that books (the words, content, form) will remain the same regardless of “delivery method.” This is why they are insistent that the medium doesn’t matter. But why would this be so? Sure, they mimic paper books right now, but that’s because pbooks still exist and are still reasonably popular. If you remove pbooks from the equation, if pbooks are relegated to “fetish objects” what’s to prevent ebooks from morphing into very different things—or, rather, non-things?

I’m not passing judgment on whether that would be good or bad, I’m just pointing out that it’s likely. Not immediately, but eventually. And I just wonder if people’s feelings about ebooks might be different if, for example, they knew that eventually people would stop writing novels because that’s obsolete pbook genre. (Not really that farfetched. The novel is a pbook genre.)

Final Draft

[W]riting is fundamentally about the final draft. … A writer explores, and as he explores, he purposely forgets the way he came. I’m reminded of how the word “essay” derives from the French “essayer,” a verb meaning “to try.” It was coined in the late 16th century by Michel de Montaigne, in many ways the father of the form. Montaigne wrote as a kind of maieutic exercise, a way of drawing his thoughts into the light of day, of discovering what he wanted to say as he said it.

—James Somers

Witness

[W]e need a witness to our lives.  There’s a billion people on the planet.  What does any one life really mean?  But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything — the good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things.  All of it, all the time, everyday.  You’re saying, ‘Your life will not go unnoticed, because I will notice it.  Your life will not go unwitnessed, because I will be your witness.’

—from Shall We Dance

See also.

In our hands

Thousands of people might only read on their iPads or Kindles in the future; they may never buy another printed-on-paper novel.  Thousands more will never have books; they will tell their stories by firelight and kerosene lamp in a circle of people as they always have … .  And thousands more of us will only read books we can hold in our hands and pass on.

—Susan Straight

Downtime

Some of our most creative work gets done in downtime–waking from a nap, taking a walk, daydreaming in the shower. (Writers are particularly clean.) Downtime is when breakthrough ideas are delivered to us, unsummoned, when yesterday’s blockages somehow come unblocked. That’s because we treated ourselves to a little boredom and cleared our brains of the sludge of information. Try it.

—William Zinsser

Attached

I know how to leave one life for another but the older I get the more difficult it becomes, the more attached I am to what I leave behind.  I am tired of having to get through this and that and that other thing. I don’t think I have much get through left.

—Roxane Gay