Words

One thing I love about writing is the fact that every word has been read or thought or said--the challenge is putting these words together in a way that no one else has done before. To bring new meaning to these words by stringing them together musically and purposely. Every day we speak new sentences! When I read a book I'm always looking for sentences that give me pause and make me think and fall in love. I write these down on scraps of paper and keep them forever, thinking they might feed a poem. You'll find them scattered in my desk drawer, squashed at the bottom of my purse, little moths on book shelves. So here are a few of my favorites I have tucked away:

"The solitude became a habit, the habit became a man." Karen Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

"There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet....We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Yes yes, we're magicians. But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget." Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

"The motherly breath of suburbs -- smelled like lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies." Cormac McCarthy (I can't remember which book I pulled this from)

"...like a night, or like all nights stirred together." Patrick DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers

"The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right now. Whatever our current mood, that's the path. Aspire to be kind right in the moment." Pema Chodron, Start Where You Are

And here's a few from my favorite author, Louise Erdrich. She has a way with words like no other:

"some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense." Tales of Burning Love

"Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything / except what destroys / the insulation between yourself and your experience / or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters / this ruse you call necessity." Original Fire

"You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could." The Painted Drum