Beginning Quotes (page 52)
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The winter was not really winter at all, and therein may lie Key West's greatest charm. If one does not have to brood upon the coming of winter and the shortening of the days and the fading of the light, then perhaps one does not have to brood upon the coming of death. When the season is gentle and untreatening and seems to renew itself daily, we come to believe that spring and the long days of summer may be eternal after all. When we see the light trapped high in the sky on a summer evening,...
James Lee Burke
In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn't have it both ways, he'd pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they're supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then...
Margaret Atwood
Free will doesn’t exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of our behavior are so complex that we can’t trace them back. If you’ve got one line of dominoes knocking each other down one by one, then you can always say, Look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the casual chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to.
Orson Scott Card
In the Author’s mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariable begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form: a verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you have the Author’s impulse complete. (from the essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said)
C. S. Lewis
I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standardsand I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may perhaps stand at the beginning of
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Ayn Rand
Anna Karenina is sheer perfection as a work of art. No European work of fiction of our present day comes anywhere near it. Furthermore, the idea underlying it shows that it is ours, ours, something that belongs to us alone and that is our own property, our own national 'new word'or, at any rate, the beginning of it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
