Category Archives: Quotes

Living Dialogic Threads

The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance, it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. After all, the utterance arises out of this dialogue as a continuation of it and as a rejoinder to it.

—Mikhail M. Bakhtin
in The Bakhtin Reader (1994, p. 76)

A bridge thrown between myself and another

[W]ord is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. … A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee. A word is territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor.

—V.N. Voloshinov
in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1986, p.86).

A Tissue of Cita(Quota)tions

We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.

—Roland Barthes
“Death of the Author”
in Aspen 5+6 (1967)

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture.

—Roland Barthes
“Death of the Author”
in Image, Music, Text (1988, p. 146)

Private Stuff

Early in the novel “When You Reach Me,” which last week won the John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature, the narrator, Miranda, falls into an uncomfortable conversation with a schoolmate about her favorite book, “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle.

Miranda, who is 11, doesn’t want to have the discussion. “The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my book,” she thinks. “It’s like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.”

—Motoko Rich

Searches for Truths

Members of the OnFiction group have (if I may speak for all of us) been a bit dissatisfied with the idea that non-fiction is true and fiction is untrue. We prefer to see fiction in terms of its subject matter: exploration of how selves make their sometimes problematic ways through the social world.
…
Uncertainty about what really happened is an issue that rightly exercises historians and journalists. But the deeper issue, raised by [Frederic] Bartlett though not mentioned by [Daniel] Mendelsohn, is that when remembering or, indeed, when trying to make sense of anything for the first time, we are constantly engaged in an “effort after meaning” (Bartlett, p. 20). In his refusal to write an autobiography, Freud wasn’t worrying about truth and untruth, but about truth and lying.
…
Fiction, then, in which one searches for truths other than those of mere actuality, as if from the inside, may be the real expression of the human effort after meaning.

—Keith Oatley

Sentences

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, ”Do you think I could be a writer?”

”Well,” the writer said, ”I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?”

The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ”I liked the smell of the paint.”

—Annie Dillard

All facade, no scaffold.

Why don’t poems have more ideas? So many poems I read are essentially just descriptions. So you went outside. It was beautiful. Or not. I don’t care how creatively you describe it, if it didn’t trigger any thoughts beyond “Hells yeah I am going to describe this,” it’s not a poem. …  Lots of poems I read in the slush, if you took out the description, there’d be nothing left. All facade, no scaffold.

—Elisa Gabbert

Your Reality

What you do from day to day ultimately becomes your reality. So it got to the point when, even though I was writing The Harmony Silk Factory, I started to think of myself as an attorney. That was the moment I realized I had to stop.

—Tash Aw


Scraps

I do always begin with something I found, usually when I wasn’t looking (on the internet, on a random road trip, in a desk drawer I thought was empty). Sometimes it’s a quote, a set of facts, an object…the more random or obscure, the better, because I like to think I’m the first one (or at least the first one in awhile) to discover it and wanna make something of it. This feeling of discovery, however unwarranted, is preferable to the feelings I have when I try to invent.

Then I paste or retype these little scraps so that there’s something ‘real’ on the page to work with, or at least look at, when I begin the actual writing part, which often doesn’t happen until weeks or months later.  That way, when I re-open the document,I have place to start from.

—Rosalynn Tyo