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Literary Heat on a Cold New England Eve:

Quotes to Spark Your Muse

 

Beauty is not loveliness, grace, or pleasurable sights, though any of those might certainly be part of it. For the writer out to evoke the texture of experience, beauty is simply accuracy, to come as close as we can to what seems to be real.

— Mark Doty, in The Art of Description, p. 66.

 

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order — willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time…

— Annie Dillard, inThe Writing Life, p. 32.

 

I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

— Eurdora Welty, in One Writer’s Beginnings, p. 104.

 

We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion?

— Henry David Thoreau, in The Journal 1837-1861, p. 55.

 

My ink pot is stood upon the hob; and the faint sizzling sound of boiling purple ink is now to be heard.

— Virginia Woolf, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1433, December 1, 1923.

 

Fiction is a game for two. You have to make it possible for a reader to play along.

— Kurt Vonnegut, in Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview, p. 132.

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You can find all these books…

…at a local independent bookstore.  There are 14 Independent Book Stores within 10 miles of Amherst. You can find them, or search for others by zip code, here.