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Writing Quotations that Inspire

© Laura Elvin

This week's installment has to do with inspiration. One of the easiest forms of inspiration comes from quotes. You know, where someone else said exactly the same thing you'd LIKE to say, except that they did it in a much more eloquent manner.

So we'll focus on quotes about writing for a second.

"The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood." --Susan Sontag

I like this quote because it reminds me that "safe" writing is generally boring writing. I don't think it's best to have the sole intention of shocking the reader, but if you can find something to write about that ends up with that effect, it's generally quite a good thing. I read a lot of stories by beginning writers that just bore me to tears because there's no controversy either in thought or action. The only emotion present is basically a typical love or hate that are so common place as to be interchangeable. And I'm usually wondering if they're writing some true personal account and trying to pass it off as fiction; that's how boring it is. Because fiction generally IS a lot more exciting than our daily lives. Anyway, Ms. Sontag obvious sums up in a wonderfully pithy manner how I feel about the subject.

"Never judge a book by its movie." -- J. W. Eagan

I find this funny, but quite true. No more needs to be said on the subject.

"I am a part of everything that I have read." -- John Kieran

I like this one because it emphasizes the importance of reading.

"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think." - Mccosh

Great and I totally agree. Too many things (literary-wise) are handed to us on a silver platter. I'm not saying I want things so cryptic I have a stroke trying to figure out what I'm reading, but I DO like the sensation of feeling like what I'm reading exercises my brain and gives me ideas I had never thought before.

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us... We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." - Franz Kafka

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