Category Archives: quotes

January 14, 2016   Michael   David Bowie, great books, lists, memory, Michael, quotes, reading  
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When it’s good, I’m really good, and when it’s bad, I go to pieces

My musical hero and idol David Bowie died on Sunday at the age of 69, and it felt to me like a light had gone out in the world. He was, along with Jim Henson and Stanley Kubrick, one of the three great artistic influences on my life. (That combination should explain me and my taste pretty perfectly.) I wanted to join in the celebrating and singing like they were doing in Brixton, but I kept bursting into tears. (Am I the only one who cries about ten times more easily as I get older?)

I really don’t remember there being a before-Bowie time in my life. He was there in my childhood, on MTV looking all sweaty in Australia in the “Let’s Dance” video. There he was in Labyrinth, which I remember watching at my friend Paul’s house (Paul knew all the cool movies), laughing hysterically and rewinding over and over to watch him step from the bottom of a platform to the top, in what at the time seemed like mind-blowing special effects. Then there was my obsession with the “changesbowie” album, which got me really hooked on his music. From there, my love only accelerated.

I was lucky to see Bowie live several times 2002-2003, including at an amazingly intimate show at Jimmy’s Bronx Cafe during his New York Marathon tour. The man couldn’t have been more than 25 feet away, playing songs from the brilliant Heathen, but also favorites like “Starman,” “Be My Wife,” and even “Ziggy Stardust.” I might have smiled for days afterwards. When he had a heart attack on stage in 2004, I had a feeling we weren’t going to see him play live again. And he disappeared, for the most part, for so many years. (Though this cameo on Extras in 2006 cracks me up every time I watch it.)

When Bowie released The Next Day last year on his birthday, I was hopeful that we’d entered a new era of music. And I was thrilled when it was announced that yet another album, Blackstar, was coming on his birthday this year. It’s clear now that this period of creativity was a goodbye, and what a way to go. The man’s been dealing with mortality and dying since the beginning, but relistening to this new album through the lens of his dying…damn.

So, while this post was mainly a way for me to deal with my own grief, it also has to do with books! Because, as I’m sure you’ve heard many times over, Bowie was quite the reader. And boy was his taste varied, as evidenced by this list of his 100 must-read books. If you’ve been following along with him at all, many of the books aren’t much of a surprise, and also not surprising is where our reading overlaps: The Gnostic Gospels, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, The Great Gatsby, The Iliad. Those works influenced some of my favorite Bowie albums, like Diamond Dogs, Station to Station, and Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, and it’s fun to try to make other connections between the books and his own work.

Looking at this list and thinking about his lyrics, I can’t help but wonder what a Bowie novel would have read like. It would have been weird and likely esoteric, and I likely would have spent ages trying to decipher it. And I would have loved every minute of it.

Saying goodbye to friends is hard. I miss knowing that David Bowie is another person in our world, making things brighter, shinier and weirder. But I will continue to celebrate his music and spirit, and I’m going to try my damnedest to grab life and knowledge by the throat the way he did.

“Should’ve took a picture

Something I could keep

Buy a little frame, something cheap

For you

Everyone says hi”

November 17, 2015   sharon   inspiration, optimism, quotes  
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A living fire to lighten the darkness

Over the past week, news from around the world has been terrifying and heartbreaking. In times of great danger and violence, when fellow humans across the globe are running for their lives and seeking refuge for their families, we feel helpless and often turn to our favorite things – books! – for comfort and distraction. On Saturday afternoon I saw a lot of smart bookish friends on Twitter admitting to feeling very guilty for spending the afternoon cozy at home reading, with tea, chocolate, blankets, pets, loved ones. I felt that way myself.

But books are just as important in troubled times as in light ones, because reading builds empathy. A 2013 study suggested that reading actually affects the neurological connectivity in the brain – and I believe the compassion we earn from books is even simpler than that. Reading takes you to worlds outside your own, brings you inside the joys and fears and decision-making of characters totally unlike you facing obstacles you may never experience. Reading reminds you there are the human lives making up the faceless statistics from a country you may never see as well as marginalized communities in your hometown, right outside your front door. Reading gives you brave heroines to imitate and callow villains to avoid following. As Madeleine L’Engle said beautifully in her Newbery award speech, “A book, too, can be a star, ‘explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,’ a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”

When you see horrible things on the news – or when you see friends and loved ones responding in ways that you strongly disagree with – respond with love and compassion.  And then it’s okay to pick up a book and escape from things for a little bit – you’re refilling your empathy tank.

What are your favorite comfort reads? Any recommendations for a book that opened a new world up for you and made you a better person?

                                                                    

July 23, 2015   Erin   advice, quotes, work, writing  
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“WORK all the time.”

I love Jack London. I love him because he struggled through life, never gave up, and got better because of it. He never begrudged life or nature for its callousness. He was never the type of writer who gave up after a single rejection, or even after a hundred. And more than that, when he did become successful, he never stopped working. Proof of that can be seen in his “Getting Into Print,” published in 1903, which you can read here.

There’s a lot to be said for the try and try and try method, but something I found fascinating about London’s efforts is that he continued to write new things. If he received a rejection, he moved onto the next project. His prolific nature and his ability to continue writing new projects when his old ones failed, allowed him to grow as a writer. Not that a single rejection means a your work is a failure, but if something is consistently not working, why dwell on it? Revise it, and in the mean time write something new. Most importantly, as London says, “And Work. Spell it in capital letters, WORK. WORK all the time.”

What more can you do?

June 30, 2015   sharon   Goodreads, quotes, reading, Sharon  
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Living Sentences

 

I’ve been thinking about sentences today. This morning I came across a Buzzfeed post rounding up “53 Of The Most Heartbreaking Sentences In Fantasy Books”, including DGLM author Jacqueline Carey at #9. Then around lunch time David Morrell’s RAMBO was included in a HuffPost list of great opening sentences. And just now a Facebook pal shared this beautiful Paris Review essay about discovering a sentence from his long-out-of-print book had a wild and unexpected new life. The signs are clear – sentences are the theme of the day, and it got me curious about sentences that truly stand out.

Fiction writers work so hard over every detail of their books, carefully choosing a setting in place and time, planning out the key plot events, bringing the main characters to life. But it seems that many of the most quoted (most Pinterested, Instagrammed, tattooed, wedding-vowed) sentences have very little to do with the story or its characters. Just browse the most popular quotes on Goodreads, and you’ll see that I’m right – very few of these offer any sort of spoiler, or are hard to understand if you haven’t read the book. They are sentences powerful enough in their meaning and in the beauty of their language to live outside of the book that was their first home.

I spent some time pondering my favorite sentences from my lifetime of reading, and wanted to share a couple with you here.

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“No bathroom on earth will make up for marrying a bearded man you hate.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

 

Have you ever loved a sentence from a book you haven’t read? What are your favorite sentences?

Share in the comments!

January 20, 2010   DG&B   fun, Miriam, opinion, quotes, sarcasm  
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SarcMarking

by Miriam

It’s hard not to be amused by the SarcMark and the notion that writers need a symbol to express sarcasm. And yet, I worry that this new emoticon (someone’s already peddling the software that will add it seamlessly to your happy/sad face repertoire) is just another way to dumb down the writing process. If you can’t convey sarcasm on the page (or the screen) with the right combination of syntactical elements such as repetition, hyperbole, and oppositional concepts–and a dash of general mean spiritedness–well then you probably should just resort to being earnest.

Can you imagine these people using a SarcMark?

“No, Groucho is not my real name. I am breaking it in for a friend.” – Groucho Marx

“You have delighted us long enough.” – Jane Austen

“He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” – Winston Churchill

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” – Mark Twain.

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” – William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” – Ernest Hemingway