But I think more than writing, I love reading. I love diving into books and finding paragraphs, quotes, essays that stop me on the page. I re-read the words a second, third, fourteenth time to try and understand once more what I've just read and what the words mean to me. That's the best part about reading, the meaning is different for everyone. Do you know the ending of Harry Potter? The last line 'All was well.' I hate that line. Everyone that loves HP, that I've obsessed about it with, has said what a beautiful line it is. And I see the beauty, but I wanted something more. That's what I love about reading. The wanting. The differences in opinion. The stories that live off the page.
Over the past few weeks, I've really sunken into my own writing and tried my best to look at it from a reader's point of view. Which words, which phrases, will keep the reader on the page? I hope there's a few.
I've collected a few of my favorite quotes from the last couple of books I've read. I hope you check them out! And, cough cough, I love book suggestions! Send me some!!
Here goes:
From WILD by Cheryl Strade (A Minnesota gal!)
I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I'd wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very heigh of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her, but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could full. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again.
From CASUAL VACANCY by JK Rowling
You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it's whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.
It was so good to be held. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort. Why had humans ever learned to talk?
From THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY by Oscar Wilde
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
From THE PLEASURE OF MY COMPANY by Steve Martin
(which may be my very favorite book right now)
The irony is that the one person who gives me money is the one person I wish I could hand the check back to and say no, only joy can pass between you and me.
She didn't see me, though; she doesn't know me. But there was a time when Liz Taylor and Richard Burton had never met, yet it doesn't mean they weren't, in some metaphysical place, already in love.
I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet heart.
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