Lauren Groff on Work and Love
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
Menu
Why do we love quotations? We share them on Instagram, stick them up on our fridges, hang them over our kitchen sinks, offer them to friends in need, and if you’re like me, collect them in a book. My passion for quotations began when I was a teenager. My mother had a bulletin board above our wall phone and a pushpin held a scrap of paper with a line I read over and over again while talking to my friends—in those days phones weren’t portable, and I was on the phone a lot. “In dreams begin responsibilities.” I didn’t it know at the time, but it isn’t technically a quotation; it’s the title of a short story by Delmore Schwartz. And it isn’t originally Schwartz’s line; he took it from the epigraph to W.B. Yeats’s Responsibilities and Other Poems that Yeats attributed to “an Old Play.” To me, the words were true and provocative, and as I stared at them during my phone sessions they got deeper and more complicated. Was this a hopeful line? Was it sad? Was it practical? Was it the answer to how to live my life? I read Schwartz. I read Yeats. I was hooked. When I read books, I underline. When I read e-books, I highlight. Still, I like to print out some lines and tuck them away in a special folder. I turn to that folder when I need inspiration for a speech or for writing a thank-you note or for when I’m down in the dumps. They give me solace. Sometimes they motivate me. Sometimes they solve a problem. Sometimes they simply make me happy that such beautiful language exists in this world. When my son, Nick, was born and I started reading books aloud to him, my folder grew and grew. Some books I had a hard time reading as many times as he insisted. ( Please, Mom, again, again! ) But other books were a complete pleasure to reread, because their words were poetry and their wisdom was ageless. My first collection of children’s quotations for adults, What the […]
Click here to view original page at You Can Quote Me on That: On Finding Inspiration in the Language of Children’s Books
© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
