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"Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around."
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"For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose."
"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air."
"I have spent a good many years since-too many, I think-being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."
"He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn't the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?"
"When you aren't satisfied with what has already been done, make something better. That is the greatest responsibility and the true freedom of creativity. The freedom is in that it doesn't need to complain."
"Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas."
"We write to shed our sorrows and give strength to our spirit."
"My pen beats faster as I write with my heart."
"How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, and skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity.
Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came."
Explore more quotes by Anna Quindlen
"All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child."
"In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat."
"I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me."
"People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it."
"If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children."
"I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words."
"Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle."
"The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible; that is, that one is male and the other female."
"There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger."
"America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security."
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