Sublime

“Be scared. You can’t help that,” William Faulkner put it. “But don’t be afraid.”

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…” —Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem1

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”

— William Faulkner

Stoner shook his head, almost in admiration. “My God,” he said. “How you make it sound! Sure, everything you say is a fact, but none of it is true. Not the way you say it.”

“No man can know what power he can rightly call his own unless he presses a little,” he wrote.

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings.

“Snows of Kilimanjaro”

“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame,”

“The more a man is, the less he wants.”