Top 15 Quotes & Sayings by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

what I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow.

My head aches, my eyes burn, my arms and legs have given up, and my face in the mirror has a grayish cast. The bed, across the room, calls in its unmistakable lover's croon, Come to me, come, only I can make you truly happy, oh, how happy I'll make you, don't resist, remember how you moan with pleasure the instant we touch..... Laura Acosta

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Head held high and lips parted, she breathed in the music, sending it through her torso and arms and legs the way the Tai Chi teacher told us to breath the air, transforming it into energy, motion. Dancing is the body's song, and Bess sang.

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played.

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.

Getting away from being 'a good girl' is important because it's impossible to be a 'good girl' and a writer at the same time.

The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead.

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer.