Quotenik

Eudora-Welty/Author-Agent/knowledge

Eudora Welty — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:39:32 +0000

“What you look for in the world is not simply for what you want to know, but for more than you want to know, and more than you can know, better than you had wished for, and sometimes something draws you to a discovery and there is no other happiness quite the same.”

Author-and-Agent

Sara Bader — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:19:19 +0000

Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell

David-Milarch/The-Man-Who-Planted-Trees/lived-a-thousand-years

David Milarch — Mon, 14 May 2012 11:02:18 +0000

“A tree that lives a thousand years might know something about survival.”

May-Sarton/Encore

Sara Bader — Mon, 14 May 2012 02:18:56 +0000

Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year

May-Sarton/Encore/olive-branch

May Sarton — Sun, 13 May 2012 22:25:35 +0000

“One day when I got home at Fourteen Wright Street, Judy opened the door and looked so stricken that I said, ‘Judy, what’s happened? Has Tom Jones died?’ That was our cat. She said, ‘No, but Volta Hall has had a heart attack and died.’ I suppose this is one of the most terrifying blows life has to offer: when you psychiatrist disappears. Within the next two days I wrote an elegy for Volta Hall which is in the Collected Poems and in which the repeated line is, “Now the long lucid listening is done.’ I sent this to his widow with a bunch of violets. There was no reply. I thought perhaps there is an unwritten rule that the wife of a psychiatrist does not make contact with a patient even after he himself has died. So I thought no more about it. About ten years later I had a note from her asking if she could come to see me. She came and told me that I would never know what that poem had meant, that she could give it to her children so they could see what her husband and their father had been for so many patients and what he was in himself. She also came—and this touched me deeply—to ask my bessing on her remarriage, as though I was speaking, in a way, for Volta. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘that’s what he would want.’
You never know, when you send out a bird with an olive branch in its beak, whether it will come back or not.”

Anaïs Nin / Diary 1 / writer / two lives

Anaïs Nin — Sun, 13 May 2012 07:30:30 +0000

“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”

CNN/Obama/same-sex-marriage

President Barack Obama — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:14:14 +0000

“At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

Barack Obama / New Yorker / interview / Michelle / partnership

President Barack Obama — Thu, 10 May 2012 10:38:09 +0000

“…I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.”

Samuel-Johnson/Lives-of-the-Most-Eminent-English-Poets/end-of-writing

Samuel Johnson — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:39:48 +0000

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

Peter-Kaminsky/Eating-Well/NYTimes/fat-sugar

Peter Kaminsky — Tue, 08 May 2012 03:41:08 +0000

“Fat is not the enemy. Sugar is the enemy.”

John-Banville/Paris-Review/Intv/sentence

John Banville — Mon, 07 May 2012 10:59:10 +0000

“Occasionally I will leave behind a sentence that I know is missing a word, and I’ll go back to it later. I wrote a sentence like that yesterday. A man is talking about his wife, who’s a singer. She has just woken up in the morning, and he says, ‘Even half asleep like this, she sounded a true, dark note, a thrilling…’ I put in ‘cadence,’ but I know it’s not the right word—so the sentence is just sitting there, waiting for me to find the right, the exact, the only word.”

Elizabeth-Bishop/Letter/Robert-Lowell/health

Elizabeth Bishop — Wed, 02 May 2012 02:32:37 +0000

“Please—take care of your health! Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs—no regular hours—so many temptations!”

Elizabeth-Bishop/letter/Robert-Lowell/higher-self

Elizabeth Bishop — Wed, 02 May 2012 02:26:41 +0000

“Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self…”

May-Sarton/Journal-of-Solitude/psychic-pain

May Sarton — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:36:32 +0000

“Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”

JamesBaldwin / Paris Review / interview / learning to see

James Baldwin — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:00:13 +0000

“I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, Look. I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, Look again, which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.”