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Life is short, but it’s wide.

(THANKS to Shannon Holman.)

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.— Mark Twain

Still,
I would leap too
Into the light,
If I had a chance.
It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field
On the other side of the road.
They crouch there, too, faltering in terror
And take strange wing. Many
Of the dead never moved, but many
Of the dead are alive forever in the split second
Auto headlights more sudden
Than their drivers know.
The drivers burrow backward into dank pools
Where nothing begets
Nothing.

Across the road, tadpoles are dancing
On the quarter thumbnail
Of the moon. They can’t see,
Not yet.

—James Wright
 

Each time out should be a swing for the fences. Don’t do base-running drills. You can do those on your own time.

– Tobias Wolff

This is what fiction does sometimes. It makes you the outlaw. It makes you question your assumptions about yourself. It makes you question your boundaries and tests what you might and might not do, your pieties, your hypocrisies, your simple repetition of phrases that make you feel safe and good, in the moral know, in the political know. People are full of contradictions. That, to me, is the central truth we learn our whole lives long. Bad people do good things. Good people do bad things. If you want to fuel the plots of your stories, to make your characters believable and intriguing, make them contradictory. Reveal who they think they aren’t. Show us their fatal flaws.

–Robin Hemley

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive.

The point is to be as honest as possible in every sentence. I wanted to write a work that was completely exposed. I didn’t want to hide anything. I wanted to break down for myself the boundary between living and writing as much as I could.

– Paul Auster

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.

I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to
(wo)man.

we are running

running and
time is clocking us
from the edge like an only
daughter.
our mothers stream before us,
cradling their breasts in their
hands.
oh pray that what we want
is worth this running,
pray that what we’re running
toward
is what we want.

– Lucille Clifton

Lord,
the motor under me is running hot,
Lord, there are twenty-eight people
and lots of luggage in the truck.
Underneath are my bad tires.
The brakes are unreliable.
Unfortunately I have no money,
and parts are difficult to get.
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