whydoublel

on cultivating good literature

Crafting the sentence

“But I had finally learned the lesson, and it applied to my fiction as well as my nonfiction: Whenever my sentences had a function outside themselves — whether that function was connecting up other sentences, honoring the truth of a loved one’s life, or setting down an imagined world already existent in my head — they could in time be made to work. Whenever my sentences were built to be beautiful yet self-sufficient objects of attention, they collapsed.”

Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.” ~Stephen King

lydiahirt: ‘Course I love you—I love you all the time—when I wake up in the morning and have to splash around and shave—I look at your picture and think about you—and that’s a pretty deadly part of a day as you know and a good test of loving any one.  -Hemingway to Hadley Richardson, who was to become his first wife, December 23, 1920 (via Hemingway’s Letters | Culture | Vanity Fair )

lydiahirt:

‘Course I love you—I love you all the time—when I wake up in the morning and have to splash around and shave—I look at your picture and think about you—and that’s a pretty deadly part of a day as you know and a good test of loving any one.  -Hemingway to Hadley Richardson, who was to become his first wife, December 23, 1920

(via Hemingway’s Letters | Culture | Vanity Fair

)

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship, and the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, bet it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

—David Foster Wallace “This Is Water” (via we-are-vagabonds)

Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created — nothing.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

My sister and I having a quiet conversation.

My sister and I having a quiet conversation.

(Source: faeriviera)