It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one’s self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.
...Fastow had found someone trusting and pliable. Fastow wanted a pupet, Bowen concluded, and he already controlled Ben Glisan's strings. p.338
I first got very thin after Ashley. I felt like my stomach was doing backflips - like my emotions had taken over and made me full.
I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine.
Forgiveness requires a sacrifice of pride. A humbling of the spirit. An increase of selfless love. A time when you allow others' feelings to be more important than your own.
It was late afternoon. This time tomorrow he would be somewhere on a good graveled road, driving his car past things that happened to people, quicker than their happening. ("Death of a Traveling Salesman")
At the end of life, each of us must answer the question, Whose story captured my soul?
Your doubts do nothing than pouring cold water on your enviable dreams. Just keep doubts away from you and you will not dilute your success story!
We know how it ends practically before it starts. That's why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.
hermes has threatened me with slow mail. lousy Internet service and a horrible stock market if i publish this story. I hope he is just bluffing.
No one could say the stories were useless for as the tongue clacked five or forty fingers stitched corn was grated from the husk pathwork was pieced or the darning was done... (from 'The Storyteller Poems')
Marvelous! Very exciting. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and I can't wait to read more." (About the book Dominique Ick Lessont and the Dragon Knight)
I spent the rest of the day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs.
The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of Job, who becomes human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan.
People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries....But isn't that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along, and wants to borrow them.
What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?
The Devil went down to Georgia, he was lookin' for a soul to steal. He was in a bind, 'cos he was way behind; he was willing to make a deal.
He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.
Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.
You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words.
I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places.
