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Alex Wheeler

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The Sound and the...
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Émile Zola
“From the moment I start a new novel, life’s just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there’s still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. I begin to say the book’s no good, far inferior to my earlier ones, until I’ve wrung torture out of every page, every sentence, every word, and the very commas begin to look excruciatingly ugly. Then, when it’s finished, what a relief! Not the blissful delight of the gentleman who goes into ecstasies over his own production, but the resentful relief of a porter dropping a burden that’s nearly broken his back . . . Then it starts all over again, and it’ll go on starting all over again till it grinds the life out of me, and I shall end my days furious with myself for lacking talent, for not leaving behind a more finished work, a bigger pile of books, and lie on my death-bed filled with awful doubts about the task I’ve done, wondering whether it was as it ought to have been, whether I ought not to have done this or that, expressing my last dying breath the wish that I might do it all over again!”
Émile Zola, The Masterpiece

Marcel Proust
“All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.”
Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Mary MacLane
“I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel—everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.”
Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

Cormac McCarthy
“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

William H. Gass
“We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.”
William H. Gass, The World Within the Word

year in books
Mallory
541 books | 83 friends

James
87 books | 43 friends

Ashley ...
336 books | 132 friends

Taylor ...
283 books | 77 friends

giselle
209 books | 32 friends

Willow ...
1,441 books | 252 friends

Olivia ...
409 books | 57 friends

Hunter ...
16 books | 91 friends

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