“This is a female text, composed by folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores. This is a female text, born of guilt and desire, stitched to a soundtrack of nursery rhymes.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age, I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms, and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
When a person is twenty-one or twenty-two years old facing that great enigma about what to do, envying the law students or medical students who can get on a set of rails and run on it and know where they’re going, the writer doesn’t know. But a writer should also bear in mind there are numerous paths to this goal and they’re all O.K. It’s like a huge river with a lot of islands in it. You can go to an island to the left or right… You might get into an eddy. But you’re still in the river. You’re going to get there. If a person expects the big answer at twenty-one, that’s ridiculous. Everyone’s in the dark.
— John Mcphee, The New Yorker
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space… All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.
— Joan Didion, Why I Write