Some years ago I saw an exhibition of the work of Alexander Calder at the San Jose Art Museum. Near a photograph of Calder bending a piece of wire into someone’s profile were these words of Calder’s: “I think in wire.” The moment I read his words I realized that I think in quotations, linking them together, to capture and express other thoughts. Here are some of my favorites.
Writing is prayer. Franz Kafka
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. And God said. . . Genesis 1:1
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. John 1:1
And were every tree that is in the earth made into pens and the sea to supply it with ink, with seven more seas to increase it, the words of Allah would not come to an end. Koran 31:27
True words are not beautiful.
Beautiful words are not true. Tao Te Ching 81
When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake. Plato
The world of letters is the true world of bliss. Abraham Abulafia
When the messiah comes, he’ll walk up to every person he meets and ask them for their story. This will be a new Torah. The Apter Rebbe
The pen is mightier than the sword. Edward Bulwer-Lytton
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Henry David Thoreau
A word is dead
When it is said
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
that day. Emily Dickinson
The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time. T.S. Eliot
Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word,
preserves contact – it is silence which isolates. Thomas Mann
Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking. John Maynard Keynes
How do I know what I think until I see what I say? E. M. Forster
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. Virginia Woolf
You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. Ernest Hemingway
I hope I will be able to confide everything in you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support. Anne Frank
Bedizened or stark
naked, man, the self, the being we call human,
writing
master to this world. Marianne Moore
Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there. Thomas Berger
As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your aloneness. Ursula K. LeGuin
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there William Carlos Williams
In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence. Adrienne Rich
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is the miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path for you to follow. Soon you find yourself in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. Annie Dillard
To create is sacred because it’s all we know of God.
Tennessee Williams
I keep feeling that there isn’t one poem being written by any one of us – or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writing, the whole product I guess I mean, is one long poem – a community effort if you will. It’s all the same poem. It doesn’t belong to any one writer – it’s God’s poem perhaps. Or God’s people’s poem. Anne Sexton
God made man because He loves stories. Elie Wiesel
A story must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself. My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher.
And he related how his teacher used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that hour he was cured of his lameness. That’s how to tell a story. Martin Buber
I wanted to be what I was, to be what I was born to be – not to have a “career,” but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer. Cynthia Ozick
All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story. Isak Dinesen
When a new child is born in the family, the ancestors gather above it and whisper among themselves: “Maybe this will be the one who will tell our stories and heal our lineage.” Angeles Arrien
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. Leonard Bernstein
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be he must be. Abraham Maslow
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. E. L. Doctorow
It is the responsibility of writers to listen to gossip and pass it on. It’s the way story tellers learn about life. Grace Paley
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. Anaïs Nin
A novel is a prose work of some length that has something wrong with it.
Randall Jarrell
In a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world. Vladimir Nabakov
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. Jorge Luis Borges
The universe is made up of stories,
not atoms. Muriel Rukeyser
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