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"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."
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!["A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw==)
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"Socially interacting with a storyteller can be a frustrating challenge because a portion of her awareness is constantly sorting through the details of a developing book. And while you may successfully engage in a meaningful conversation with her, an additional part of her mind is frantically sifting through descriptive lines to be used if ever she were to write this exchange down. The trouble with writers is that they are ALWAYS writing!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Far more often [than asking the question 'Is it true?'] they [children] have asked me: 'Was he good? Was he wicked?' That is, they were far more concerned to get the Right side and the Wrong side clear. For that is a question equally important in History and in Faerie."
Author Name
Personal Development
"To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else."
Author Name
Personal Development
"This is how deeply rooted stories are, folks. We crave them before we can walk, and we start telling them before we can talk."
Author Name
Personal Development
"As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper."
Author Name
Personal Development
"What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Experience is the catalyst for all great stories."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid, a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way."
Author Name
Personal Development
"What are these fundamental principles, if they are not atoms?""Stories. And they give me hope."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We owe it to each other to tell stories."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard."
Humor
"Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you."
Personal
"Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan."
Romance
"But I have no mind for business and considered staying awake to be enough of an accomplishment."
Lifestyle
"The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely."
Survival
"I realized I was a teacher when I felt warm during class and got up to open the door. Later on there was noise in the hallway, so I got up and shut it. Students can't open and close the door whenever they feel like it."
Teaching
"I'm not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won't stop crying, but at least now it'll be doing it for a good reason."
Provocation
"When asked 'What do we need to learn this for?' any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness."
School
"If you are any kind of an artist, then validation can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway. Because you're just wired that way. It's so engrained, it's such a part of your personality that you don't just stop doing it."
Passion
"I've been keeping a diary for thirty-three years and write in it every morning. Most of it's just whining, but every so often there'll be something I can use later: a joke, a description, a quote. It's an invaluable aid when it comes to winning arguments. 'That's not what you said on February 3, 1996,' I'll say to someone."
Reflection
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