Most my life I have been saving quotes. Today I offer a few that encourage me as a writer and a human being. Hope they speak to you, as well.
“Writers are like the cheese in the ‘Farmer and the Dell’ – standing there all alone but deciding to take a few notes.” – Annie Lamott in Bird by Bird.
“You absorb these influences almost by osmosis and then how many years later – it’s been 22 years – they just come out. I think it’s beautiful. It’s like when there’s no rain in the desert for a long time and then it rains and these beautiful flowers pop up.” – k.d. lang speaking on NPR about the influence of Roy Orbison on her new songs. April 16, 2011
“Maclean was deeply influenced by Wordsworth’s notion of ‘spots of time,’ or moments that give life shape and meaning, ‘as if an artist had made them,’ in Maclean’s own words… His aim, he wrote, ‘was to study the topography of certain exposed portions of the surface of the soul.’” – from my sister, Susan Britton’s notes of a Norman Maclean interview
“Sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.” –Itzhak Perlman
“As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm and avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with glaciers and wild gardens and get as near the heart of the world as I can.” – John Muir
Do you have some quotable quotes to add to the stack? Extra points for inspiration and humor.
Ann Dalton
Bonny Becker
Julie Paschkis
Julie Larios
laurakvasnosky
Margaret Chodos-Irvine
Books Around The Table 
Love art. Of all the lies, it is the least untrue. -Gustave Flaubert
i love it.
thanks, joy.
Just found this tucked away in an old box of papers I was sorting through: “The brown Colorado, how hard it is for me to say yes to it, having grown up around clear water, loving clarity, realizing late the need to love mud.” (Kevin Oderman in Hunting on Human Ground.)
And oh is the Colorado muddy-mud right now. I remember looking at it’s waters rolling along, so thick with mud, I was sure I could walk across it.
and from Leonardo Da Vinci: Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
do you think he’s talking about the need to love wholeheartedly, acceptingly? or is it more about growing where you are planted, accepting the whole of a place?
I pinned up this one that came with one of my shirts: “Any imperfections only add to the homemade quality of the item”
truth is where you find it. i love art that shows the artist’s hand. here’s to homemadeness.
I think “the need to love mud” is about loving not only what is obvious or clear but loving what is hidden, difficult, complicated, nuanced, whether you find the mud in nature or you find it – metaphorically – in people.
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” ~Douglas Adams
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LOL! EXTRA POINTS AWARDED!
I want to add the quotation from YOU, Laura, that I carry around, “Making a story provides emotional distance, helps carry the pain, gives you something to do, at least, because there is NO understanding such a huge loss.” I think you said this after Hurricane Katrina?
you are so sweet to remember something i said. thanks, gretchen!
“Every movie I make, there’s a hurdle to it. I look for things that will scare me. Fear is my fuel. I get to the brink of not really knowing what to do and that’s when I get my best ideas. Confidence is my enemy and it always has been.” –Steve Spielberg.
hi sue! thanks for contributing another great quote. i suppose if it were easy we wdnt find it so compelling to try to try to make stories, but i cd use another dollup of confidence, myself.