Blog > I'm not at the point yet that I can bear to think about writing a blog. So, in the meantime, below are a series of quotes that I like...

Quotes >

• "That's a verb, 'love,' it's a thing you do, not a thing you feel."
  • John Fagan's father (character) in Circumference of Darkness by Jack Henderson)
• "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."
  • James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
• "Smart people would say that she spoke that way about the story because she was trying to take control over it, because she wanted to deny the pain of it, even make herself superior to it. This is probably true. Smart people would also say that sentimentality always indicates a lack of feeling. Maybe this is true, too."
  • Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
• "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
  • Simone Weil
• "Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms."
  • Amy Bloom, Love Invents Us
• "Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave."
  • Nick Shay (character) in Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)
• "For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never news, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."
  • James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues
• "To save the marriage, Lena had pointed him toward psychoanalysis, but his artist's aversion to prying into his own mind and risking the replacement of his magic blindness with everyday common sense kept him off the couch."
  • Arthur Miller, The Bare Manuscript in New Yorker, 16 Dec 2002
• Causality eludes us; to suppose a direct causal link between thoughts, as logic does--that is the consequence of the crudest and clumsiest observation. Between two thoughts all kinds of affects play their game: but their motions are too fast, therefore we fail to recognize them, we deny them."
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power (1888)