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Exlpore more Joy quotes

"Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."

"For me, the joy of doing it is doodling when I want to. But if I had to do it, I'd lose the joy."

"You are okay?" he asked. "Not eaten by monsters?""Not even a little bit." I showed him that I still had both arms and both legs, and Tyson clapped happily."Yay!" he said. "Now we can eat peanut butter sandwiches and ride fish ponies! We can fight monsters and see Annabeth and make things go BOOM!"I hoped he didn't mean all at the same time, but I told him absolutely, we'd have a lot of fun this summer."

"Learn more. Love more. Laugh more. Live more."
Explore more quotes by Tobias Wolff


"Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented."


"Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order."


"It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time."


"Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time."


"I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion."


"But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors."


"You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels."


"Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again."


"Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community."
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