“Do you like being a marshal?”
“I believe I like it better than anything I done since the war. Anything beats droving. Nothing I like to do pays well.”

—Mattie Ross & Rooster Cogburn, Charles Portis’ True Grit

“You were unsure which pain is worse — the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.”

—

Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After

Oh hey tumblr just brought to my dashboard this quote from my former English Professor from Hofstra. He writes beautiful books.

(Source: larmoyante)

Ordered this yesterday.

I’m reading this, and I know there’s this, but it made me think of this song, because, emo.

“Youth was often wretched, the struggle to become themselves tore the young to shreds, but sometimes, after the struggle, better days began.”

—Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton

“I know now, I understand, that in our work, Kostya—whether it’s acting or writing—what’s important is not fame, not glory, not the things I used to dream of, but the ability to endure.”

—Anton Chekhov, “The Seagull”

“From Nick Hornby in the The Believer (December, 2011):
One of the things that did me no good at all in the formative years of my career was prescriptive advice from established writers, even though I craved it at the time. You know the sort of thing: “Write a minimum of 15 drafts.” “A good book takes five years to produce.” “Learn Ulysses off by heart.” “Make sure you can identify trees.” “Read your book out loud to your cat.” I cannot tell an oak from another tree, the name of which I cannot even dredge up for illustrative purposes, and yet I got by, somehow. Walk into a bookshop and you will see work by writers who produce a book every three months, writers who don’t own a TV, writers with five children, writers who produce a book every twenty-five years, writers who never write sober, writers who have at least one eye on the film rights, writers who never think about money, writers who, in your opinion, can’t write at all. It doesn’t matter: they get the work done, and there they are, up on the shelves. They might not stay there forever: readers now and way off into the future, make that decision.”

—Little Brown Miscellanea: Advice

“Can the cityite escape? Even if he longs for dawn across the mountains and the smell of fresh air, has this victim of cave dwelling and pavement pounding half a chance to make a living back on the land? Has he the knowledge, the strength, the stamina to make the break and to survive such an ordeal? Or will he be hurled back, broken and defeated by the relentless nature forces that preside over life in the countryside?”

—Helen & Scott Nearing, the Maple Sugar Book

“Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me.”

—Christopher Hitchens, one of the greats.

“I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always had an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Bests and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live. But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (Money and High Fashion and The Hucksters), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of living there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not live at Xanadu.”

—Joan Didion (via)