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Not all those who wander are lost.
A little life, rounded with a sleep
Account with Professional package of service Created on 3 February 2002 (#458709) Last updated on 5 January 2017 Gift
Name:
Artemis Jones
Several years ago, while getting over one of those relationships that's neither good nor bad, but just not right, I had a moment of epiphany.
I was standing in the middle of a grassy field on a friend's family's homestead in New Mexico, and it had just occurred to me, at that moment, that I'd been living in a hell of my own making for the past three years.
Because life is not a novel, it struck me as ironic, rather than poetic, that I happened to look up at the sky at that moment, and saw there a bird winging its way across the unimaginable distance.
And because novels are based on life, every word I have written since that day has risen somehow from that moment, and striven to capture it in words.
None of it, including this, is perfect. Someday, some of it might be adequate.
"Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal." — T.S. Eliot
"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning." — Mark Twain
"The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name." — William Shakespeare
"If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies." — John Dos Passos
"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain." — Elie Wiesel
"Fiction gives life its form." — Jean Anouilh
"Life is not a support system for art. It's the other way around." — Stephen King
I was standing in the middle of a grassy field on a friend's family's homestead in New Mexico, and it had just occurred to me, at that moment, that I'd been living in a hell of my own making for the past three years.
Because life is not a novel, it struck me as ironic, rather than poetic, that I happened to look up at the sky at that moment, and saw there a bird winging its way across the unimaginable distance.
And because novels are based on life, every word I have written since that day has risen somehow from that moment, and striven to capture it in words.
None of it, including this, is perfect. Someday, some of it might be adequate.
"Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal." — T.S. Eliot
"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning." — Mark Twain
"The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name." — William Shakespeare
"If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies." — John Dos Passos
"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain." — Elie Wiesel
"Fiction gives life its form." — Jean Anouilh
"Life is not a support system for art. It's the other way around." — Stephen King
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