A Quote by Lynn Coady
As a novelist, you have to pick your battles. You are tired. You have begun to experience the first ominous tinglings of carpal tunnel syndrome. You wake up in the middle of the night with both hands lying across your chest like a couple of plucked bird carcasses, dead of all sensation.
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You ever wake up in the middle of the night because a couple of cats are clawing each other to death outside your window? That's what it's like listening to you speak.
It sounds kind of farfetched, yet I can't tell you how many people have had this syndrome... the 'Old Hag Syndrome.' Apparently, there's this little old lady who comes into your room at night, sits on your chest and tries to suffocate you. You can Google her - she'll pop up. She's out there.
Love is not a feeling; it's a sensation. Drinking water when you're thirsty is a sensation, not a feeling. Being in nature or swimming in the sea is a sensation, not a feeling. Lying down when you're tired is sensational, not a feeling, although you may say it feels good. Feeling is an emotional interpretation of experience and these sensations don't need interpretation; they are just good or right. Making physical love rightly is a sensation, not a feeling. So is the love of God. The same goes for joy and beauty; both are sensational.'
And if you had no tongue, no celebrating language, you’d do this: cross your hands at the wrist with palms facing towards you; place your crossed wrists over your heart (the middle of your chest, anyway); then move your hands outwards a short distance, and open them towards the object of your love. It’s just as eloquent as speech.
What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.
Both are salty, one will give me carpal tunnel, I'll go with the fries.
Many novelists say, "I'm not a political novelist" - myself included. That's a standard, even a default position. Whereas that divide between art and politics simply isn't possible in many countries. In Hungary, you couldn't be a fiction writer and then, when asked about politics, put your hands up in the air and say "But I'm not a political novelist." If you're a Chinese novelist, a novelist in a country where censorship is such an issue, how do you claim that politics has nothing to do with your writing? It's in your writing, it's shaping your words.
Do me a favor - right now, today, start a list of all your crazy obsessions, the things that get your heart pumping, that wake you up in the middle of the night. Put it above your desk and use it to guide you, to jumpstart your writing each and every day.
I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.
If you had told me in 1997 that even 5 people would be waiting online for me to sign my new book in 2009, I would have jumped around like Joe Carter in the 1993 World Series. I love it. I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't like it. The only thing I worry about is carpal tunnel syndrome - my last tour almost caused it.
If you want to be your best, spend a lot of time exploring what is more than enough. Push yourself until the bar is lying immobile across your chest. Push yourself right off the edge of your capacity.
I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.
The best advice when playing from the small blind is to mix up your play. The general rules are to fold garbage hands, limp with marginal hands, and raise with hands that are strong enough to play big pots with. Don't allow your opponents, however, to pick up patterns in your play.
I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.
Look,
Here are we
On this starry night staring into space.
And I must say
I feel as small as dust
Lying down here.
What point could there be troubling?
Head down wondering what will
Become of me,
Why concern we cannot see
But no reason to abandon it.
Time is short but that's all right,
Maybe I'll go in the middle of the night.
Take your hands from your eyes, my love,
Everything must end some time,
Don't burn the day away.
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