Justin Lancy

The Chinese term chi ku, “eat bitterness,” is shorthand for being tough, doing what it takes, bearing hardship.

A story exists in language, but lives in the imagination, in the memory. When does a story live? It lives only when it is read or heard. A story is part telling, part hearing. Part writing, part reading. It dwells in the ambiguous place between the teller and the hearer, between the writer and the reader. The greatest storytellers understand this

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

get hold of Tropic of Cancer, get hold of Black Spring and read especially the first hundred pages. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late date, with English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken language, but spoken without fear, i.e. without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetical word. The; adjective

The only true way to expand your world is to inhabit an otherness beyond ourselves. There is one simple word for this: empathy. Don’t let them fool you. Empathy is violent. Empathy is tough. Empathy can rip you open. Once you go there, you can be changed. Get ready: they will label you sentimental. But the truth is that the cynics are the

The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.

To be history in America doesn’t mean to be recorded, noted, added to the narrative, but precisely the opposite, to be gone, banished, left behind. To be history is to be cut from the story.

A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!