Category Archives: Quotes

Words to Ponder #47

I couldn’t remember how to forget myself. I didn’t want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else — but swerve as I might, I couldn’t avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn’t hush. So this was adolescence.

–Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (1987)

Words to Ponder #46

Every now and then it’s hard to choose just one. I found a dozen wonderful quotes on food, and I narrowed it down to two this time.

This was the dawn of plastic eating in America…. We doted on Velveeta. Spam. Canned ravioli. Instant puddings. Instant anything. The further a thing was from the texture, flavor, and terrifying unpredictability of real food, the better.
–Shirley Abbott, The Bookmaker’s Daughter (1991)

Fake food — I mean those patented substances chemically flavored and mechanically bulked out to kill the appetite and deceive the gut — is unnatural, almost immoral, a bane to good eating and good cooking.
–Julia Child, Julia Child & Company (1978)

Words to Ponder #40

The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

–Erma Bombeck, Family–The Ties That Bind…And Gag! (1987)

Words to Ponder #39

A double entry, for your reading pleasure.

She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

–Eudora Welty, “Listening,” One Writer’s Beginnings (1984)

Whatever the theologians might say about Heaven being a state of union with God, I knew it consisted of an infinite library; and eternity … was simply what enabled one to read uninterruptedly forever.

–Dervla Murphy, Wheels Within Wheels (1979)

Words to Ponder #34

My diaries were written primarily, I think, not to preserve the experience but to savor it, to make it even more real, more visible and palpable, than in actual life. For in our family an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down or shared with another.
–Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Bring Me a Unicorn (1971)

This quote is in honor of Web Writers Weekend Journal Conference in Austin, which begins this afternoon. I’m looking forward to getting to know the many people whose online journals and weblogs that I read. The Internet community of writers is a fascinating one. Relationships span continents. We share opinions, debate, and entertain readers with ordinary life stories told well. We come to know aspects of many writers more deeply than their “real life” folks might. We become attached. We extend. We visit each other. We send gifts and snail mail. The Internet is invaluable to writers — it provides an opportunity for expressiveness and community that is most suitable to the introspective and sometimes solitary person.

Words to Ponder #31

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done — then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.

–Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911)