Snippets
“I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.” – Michael Herr (‘Dispatches’)
Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful. – Anne Michaels
“I’m all right. Nothing a bottle of Jack and a serrated razor couldn’t fix…”
“It falls on the sweet neck of poetry to keep the rain-pitted face of love from leaving us once and for all.”
“Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”
“The young writer should leave no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labours under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and worst of all without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.” – William Faulkner
“Asia attracts those who like to sacrifice their careers to their fate. Once the sacrifice is made, the heart beats more generously, and many things become clearer.” – Nicholas Bouvier
“That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus.” – Nicholas Bouvier
“Optimism and offense…my personal motto…” – James Carville