To thine own self be true

(Robert Frost Place, Franconia, New Hampshire)

General Quotes

• All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. -F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. -Anne Lamott

Starting to Write

• [Writing is] the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.-Mary Heaton Vorse

• The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.-Tom Stoppard

• I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that.-Pearl S. Buck

• Much of what we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.-Gail Godwin

• Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.-Barbara Kingsolver

Audience

• You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has its ends in its audience.-Flannery O’Connor

• I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.-John Cheever

Ideas/Content

• Writing is thinking.-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

• Content comes more easily if you have something to say.-Sholem Asch

• You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.-F. Scott Fitzgerald

• I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.-William Faulkner

Drafting

• Write your draft with your heart. Re-write with your head.-from the movie Finding Forrester

 Revising, Editing, Proofreading

• I constantly rewrite—an incinerator is a writer’s best friend.-Thornton Wilder

• Proofread carefully to see if any words out.-Author Unknown

• I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.-James Michener

Sentences

• I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then turn it around.

Then I have lunch.-Philip Roth

• Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.-Henry David Thoreau

• Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.-W. Somerset Maugham

• A sentence should contain no more unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.-William Strunk, Jr.

• The rule which forbids ending a sentence with a preposition is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.-Winston Churchill

Diction

• The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.-Mark Twain

• I put the words down and push them a bit.-Evelyn Waugh

• Words set things in motion….Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges.-Toni Cade Bambara

• Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.-Ernest Hemingway

• Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.-Rudyard Kipling

Punctuation

• Cut out all the exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at yourself.-F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language.-Lynn Truss

• Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools you have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go.-Annie Dillard

Style

• The best style is the style you don’t notice.-W. Somerset Maugham

Washington Post headline:
Trump is playing Russian roulette with Americans’ lives
By Jennifer Rubin

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. ”
–William Faulkner, “The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech”

Indeed, the “cure” (large-scale sending people back to work) can be (much) worse than the “problem” (T’s narrowly perceived self-centered problem of selfish political self-survival in November election).

Endangering personal health and those of others as well as risk of dying by sending people back to work in highly dangerous contexts (i.e., “cure”) are worse risks than not dying (‘the Trump problem’ of current closures, isolation policies).

Trump is right; he is a wartime president. He is at war with the medical establishment and their wisdom and is against what’s best for America and its people, by and large.

Make no mistake. Letter/parcel carriers and truck drivers that are keeping North America going right now. All the delivery guys and gals bringing food, supplies and online orders.

and signs of spreading mental illness (in high places).

Headline today:
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick: ‘Lots of Grandparents Willing to Die to Save Economy for Grandchildren’.

A truly sick value, view, wild fantasy, and political agenda.

Instead of: use your energy and will to protect yourself and your health, those of your family and grandkids. Be concerned about your community, your area, the actual physical battle against coronavirus, the health of health care workers and people on the frontlines. Practical and socially responsible here-and-now reality situation ethics.

99% to first-time buyers, according to one owner.
Must be getting ready for The Big American Shootout when social order breaks down Stateside.

Walter de la Mare’s “Someone came knocking at my wee small door” in elementary school. In gr.7, my last round of Halloween in Winnipeg, an adult put me on the spot insisting I perform a “trick” as in “Trick or Treat” and that was the poem I remembered most of until the guy took pity on me and gave me some candy.

I can recall also memorizing William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” in grade 7 (1962) and writing it out complete with punctuation and correct spelling. Quite a feat even back then. (Can you imagine a teacher marking 30 of these?)

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed– but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

…………………………….
Years later in the 1980s, my father-in-law would impress me and others at the dinner table reciting much of John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, from his own 1940s school memory work.

The AB gov’t. paying a paltry 20 bucks per patient to drs. for giving coronavirus responses on the new app. Insulting. Only in Kenney World.

Giving grocery cashiers an extra toonie per hour for risking their lives.
Appallingly cheap. An insult.