Quotable Quotes - January 30 through February 3

As mentioned in my previous post about shaking things up on the blog, I didn’t want to just ditch the quotes post, but picking out my two favourites of the week and interpreting/discussing them wasn’t exactly working the way I’d hoped it would. It was fun to do once in awhile, but like the poetry and flash fiction, once you get locked into a weekly thing mostly it just feels like a chore, and a chore I was struggling to find time for at that.

And yet, like I said, it seems a shame to waste the quotes that Jamie and I come up with for each other. Some of them are really good, worthy of getting written up for my cork board even. So I started saving the daily quotes in a document file, and each week I’ll post the previous week’s worth of quotes. This way you get a week’s worth of inspiration all in one post. And if you like, you can let me know which (if any) quotes you found helpful or inspirational in the comments.


Some authors write with a grave ink, of a dramatic pen dipped into their dark souls.
~Terri Guillemets

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.
― Neil Gaiman


My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
~Karl Kraus

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
― Ursula K. Le Guin


Caress your phrase tenderly: it will end by smiling at you.
~Anatole France

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.
― Mary Gaitskill


“You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.”
“What mood is that?”
“Last-minute panic.”
~ Bill Watterson

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.
― Margaret Mahy


Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
~E.L. Doctorow

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe