Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
To comfort friends discouraged by their writing pace, you could offer them this: It takes years to write a book—between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant.
Annie Dillard • The Writing Life
where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing’s going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. Then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful.
Barbara Kingsolver • Demon Copperhead: Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction
To cause a reader to see in her mind’s eye an entire autumnal landscape, for example, a writer needs to deliver only a few words and images—such as corn shocks, pheasants, and an early frost.
John McPhee • Draft No. 4
In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression upon the wild land he had come to tame.
Willa Sibert Cather • O Pioneers!
“I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do. I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself. I wanted everything in the picture. I wanted room for flowers and reef fish and people who might or might not have
... See moreIf you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.
Barbara Kingsolver • Demon Copperhead: A Novel
Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees. The furniture is in place; you go back for your thermos of coffee. Then, wincing, you step out again
... See moreAnnie Dillard • The Writing Life
