A Quote by Jesmyn Ward

It felt like an indulgence. Going back was painful, but, at the same time, it was nice to live with them again for a few pages. I got to live with my brother again for the entire book. Of course as I'm writing the book, I'm getting closer and closer to the end and I know what that means. I knew exactly where I was heading. It was really difficult, but it was nice to make them come alive for those scenes. It was good.
Imagine that the world is a circle, that God is the center, and that the radii are the different ways human beings live. When those who wish to come closer to God walk towards the center of the circle, they come closer to one another at the same time as to God. The closer they come to God, the closer they come to one another. And the closer they come to one another, the closer they come to God.
To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or two? Or for five pages or 10 pages. I like to think they're still out there - still living - but for me they kind of die, too. It's kind of sad. I don't think about them anymore unless I give them life again.
I was 12 and read my first romance novel; it was a sweeping desert saga, and I got to the end of it and was like, 'I want to go back and start all over again!' That emotional response to the book and getting to the end of a story you love is what inspires me to write the next book.
There will never again be a day exactly like today. There will never again be a moment exactly like this moment. After my next birthday, I will never again be the age I am right now. After midnight tonight, today will be part of history. Someday I'll be dying and I'll wish I'd done all the things I want to do now. Someday I'll be dead and I won't be able to do anything. But today, right now, I'm alive. And yet I'm writing nonsense on the back of my literature book. But I'm alive. And yet I'm just sitting here. But I'm alive.
I don't have a twin, but I do have a brother and sisters, and I do know that there is a special bond there that is - I'm going to say - closer. It's different. It's closer than having a best friend. It's easier to forgive them. I think it's also easier to get mad at them. You feel a little piece of yourself in them.
I think most of us who live into our 50s have had a few experiences with death. You know, we see people we know start to die. We realize it's getting closer and closer for us.
In The Last of Her Kind, Sigrid Nunez once again creates characters of such depth and situations of such vivid moral complexity that reading these pages is like living them. Only as I closed the book did I sadly realize that Georgette and Ann weren't my neighbors. But happily I can revisit them again, and again, in this beautiful and absorbing novel.
If you look at coastlines, if you look at that them from far away, from an airplane, well, you don't see details, you see a certain complication. When you come closer, the complication becomes more local, but again continues. And come closer and closer and closer, the coastline becomes longer and longer and longer because it has more detail entering in.
It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.
My writing's like a journey. I'll know some of the stops ahead of time, and I'll make some of those stops and some of them I won't. Some will be a moot point by the time I get there. You know every script will have four to six basic scenes that you're going to do. It's all the scenes where your characters really come from.
Twitter brings you closer. I mean, we see this over and over again from our users. It brings them closer to the action. It brings them closer to their heroes.
When people are described as difficult and have a reputation as difficult it's 99% of the time because they've been disappointed over and over again by people who don't really know what to do for them, and I know I'm going to make them happy and I can't wait to work with them.
Your first job, I tell people I mentor, is managing your affect. Be nice and say nice things. Make it so that the people walk away from interacting with you and say, 'That was fun.' That will make them want to come back and do it again.
The only things I read are gossip columns. If I read three pages of a book, I'm out like a light. When I pick up the book again, I've forgotten what I've read and have to start over again. By page three, even if I've just awakened from a nine -hour nap, I fall asleep again. So if anyone gives me a book, it had better have lots of pictures.
You don't need the painful memories, because either you've resolved them. Denying always makes them want to come back. Denial is a mechanism that doesn't work. But allowing them to come back in little by little, those memories, you can begin to be quite comfortable with them, and it's even nice to have that as part of the map of your life.
Most book things now (with a few exceptions) are just built around nice, safe books written for nice and safe book club readers. These are usually the books you see on display at Barnes and Noble. These Internet writers are like literary terrorists to me. They're training as we speak. They're getting ready to invade. They're building an army.
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