A Quote by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Every sentence has its drumbeat. rhythm is one of the most powerful dimensions of language: it separates tribes, united families, soothes children, and shocks us into new awarenesses. Every good writer, marching to his or her own drumbeat, marks out a vibrational field as home territory. The cadences of our sentences carry echos of ancestry and influence as surely as the double helix that orchstrates the life of the body.
Genetics and beats? I feel like the drumbeat is a natural thing. Our heartbeat moves at a certain BPM. The drumbeat, being the first instrument, the platform for us, being that we all kind of come from that - it's all beats.
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.
Beyond the subtle body we have something called the causal body; that's more what we are. We are a series of interconnecting awarenesses. It's like a molecular bond, DNA, a double-helix, and we can change that.
17,000 children starve on this planet every single day. That fact alone should blow any conscious person out of their chair. You know, my mother used to say that a woman’s most important job is taking care of her children and her home. I laughed at that when I was younger, but I don’t laugh at it anymore. I just realize now that every child on the planet is one of our children, and the earth itself is our home.
Poems are a dance of language that comes out when my body taps into the rhythm of language. Rhythm gets us naked and exposes our selves completely.
Crisis or transition of any kind reminds us of what matters most. In the routine of life, we often take our families-our parents and children and siblings-for granted. But in times of danger and need and change, there is no question that what we care about most is our families! It will be even more so when we leave this life and enter into the spirit world. Surely the first people we will seek to find there will be father, mother, spouse, children, and siblings.
'Genes, Girls, and Gamow' was an attempt, even more than 'The Double Helix,' to mix science with one's personal life. With 'The Double Helix,' no one had done it before, but I thought I'd try.
Life is a building. It rises slowly, day by day throughout the years. Every new lesson we learn lays a block on the edifice, which is rising silently within us. Every experience, every touch of another life on ours, every influence that impresses us, every book we read, every conversation we hear, every act of our commonest days, adds something to the invisible building.
He wanted to wake up every morning to her. Go to sleep with his body wrapped tightly around hers. He wanted her to have his child—his children. He knew he wanted to live out the rest of his life with her by his side and when he died, he wanted to die in her arms.
Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, "Emergency, emergency," and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing is has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has no been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to keep us quiet.
From the earliest moments of life, children begin to learn the fundamentals of language. The most powerful influence for effective language development are the verbal interactions with caregivers.
Really rejoice in being yourself. Have your own drumbeat.
A mother has far greater influence on her children than anyone else, and she must realize that every word she speaks, every act, every response, her attitude, even her appearance and manner of dress affect the lives of her children and the whole family.
Ernest Hemingway has been the most important influence on me as a writer. But at a certain point as a writer, I realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.
In a sense, all fiction is experimental. Every new book is an adventure into unknown territory. As Hemingway told us, you (the writer) have to go out beyond where you have gone before.
At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.
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