Brevity Magazine (2024)

26/12/2023

"It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers and very little harm comes to them."
~ Julian Barnes

19/12/2023

"Most of the things that are supposed to be so objectionable in books are things that every teenager, in the United States, not only knows, but has talked about at length in school, or on the way home from school."
~ Bennett Cerf

12/12/2023

"Over the years I have tried not to write too small, and I want to believe I have tried not to live too small, either."
~ Kent Haruf

05/12/2023

"I think the uncanny is at the heart of literary nonfiction. The places where the real slip-slides with something unrecognizable, where the familiar and the strange switch places." ~ Mary Cappello

28/11/2023

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back."
— Albert Camus

21/11/2023

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. You split your identity. You’re two selves. There’s the authorial self, which is a construct, and then there’s the self living through the construct."
— E.L. Doctorow

14/11/2023

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back."
— Albert Camus

08/11/2023

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Don’t think, just write. And if you have nothing to say, write 'nothing to say'."
— Jack Kerouac

31/10/2023

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed."

— Ray Bradbury

24/10/2023

"We read to know we're not alone. In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see."
— C.S. Lewis

17/10/2023

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning. The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart."
— Maya Angelou

10/10/2023

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."

— Jorge Luis Borges

03/10/2023

"I write pieces, and move them around. And the fun of it is watching the truthful parts slide together."
~ Elizabeth Strout

26/09/2023

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic."

— Mortimer J. Adler

20/09/2023

"It took me a long time to understand that sometimes, when I thought I was writing about ibises, I was really writing about homesickness. I learned to always pay attention to what the words in front of you are really saying."
~ Helen MacDonald

12/09/2023

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”
~ James Baldwin

05/09/2023

"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop."
~ Confucious

If you're running a race slowly, you still cross the finish line.

29/08/2023

"You can't be afraid to deal with your demons. You've got to go there to be able to write."
~ Lucinda Williams

22/08/2023

“Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.”
~ Lillian Hellman

15/08/2023

“Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
~ Walker Evans

📸 Dinty W Moore

08/08/2023

"The only way to do it is to do it." ~ Merce Cunningham

📸 Dinty W Moore

01/08/2023

"Imagination doesn't mean making things up; it means being able to understand things from the inside, emotions, events and experiences that you haven't actually been through but that you will have experienced by the time you've got them on the page." ~ David Malouf

📸 Unsplash

25/07/2023

Writing a book is "a little like riding a dream horse, who keeps changing under you as you go."
~ Richard Bausch📸

18/07/2023

"A few years ago Robert Hass said to me, 'I still don't know what I'm doing,' at which point it occurred to me that not knowing what we're doing is obviously the thing to do." ~ Dean Young

11/07/2023

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.
~ Georgia O’Keeffe

04/07/2023

"I loved this new entity, Writing, and put all my efforts into writing a memoir. Then reality hit."
~ Sandra Hager Eliason

Check out the rest of Sandra's essay here!
https://brevity.wordpress.com/2023/06/21/making-it-behave/

27/06/2023

"Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try."
~ Atul Gawande

20/06/2023

“I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy.”

~ Maya Angelou

📸

13/06/2023

“One writes out of only one thing – one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”

~ James Baldwin

📸 Unsplash

06/06/2023

"We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.”
~ Stanley Kunitz

📸 Unsplash

30/05/2023

“Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
~ George Saunders

📸 Unsplash

23/05/2023

"I write to save someone’s life, probably my own."
~ Clarice Lispector

📸 Dinty W. Moore

16/05/2023

"See with one eye, feel with the other."
~ Paul Klee

📸 Dinty W. Moore

09/05/2023

"Don’t be afraid to write badly, everyone does."
~ Frank Conroy

📸Unknown

02/05/2023

The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is. And if I die – God forbid – I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?’
~ Kurt Vonnegut

📸Unsplash

25/04/2023

“I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. We write about the world because it doesn’t make sense to us. Through writing, maybe we can pe*****te it, elucidate it, somehow make it comprehensible.”

~ Andrea Barrett

18/04/2023

"Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do"

~ Anne Carson

11/04/2023

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."

~ Hannah Arendt

03/04/2023

"Rendering the self on the page is a process of unlearning what we think we know."

~ Lise Funderburg

14/03/2023

“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”

—Pema Chödrön

📸 Dinty W. Moore