If a novel’s salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.
Get thee to the novel! – the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart’s maelstrom.
Lie, illusion, deception, she said–was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?
The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren’t the lords of the earth.
It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages.
The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.
When something does not insist on being noticed when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
When something does not insist on being noticed when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
What we remember from childhood we remember forever-permanent ghosts stamped imprinted eternally seen.
After a certain number of years our faces become our biographies.
Dedication to one’s work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else’s work not yours.
When something does not insist on being noticed when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space – for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!
In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: it’s the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.
Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
I don’t agree with the sentiment ‘write what you know.’… I think one should write what one doesn’t know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex than our small subjective selves. One should prod, goad the imagination.
Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.