it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.
It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.
The Woman Destroyed
Quote Detail
It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.
Quick Answer
What this quote page tells you
This canonical quote page keeps the full saying, the attributed author, any linked work, and the topic tags together so the quote can be cited from one stable URL.
Related Quotes
More quote cards from the same area
Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)
Trudging alone along that black road, sometimes in the teeth of wind and rain, and watching the white distant gleam of convolvulus through the park railings, gave me an exhilarating sensation of adventure.
What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about.
I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth__ ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.
A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.