Tag Archives: quote
Happy National Women’s History Month
7 Mar
March is National Women’s History Month. I’ll be posting quotes by women writers each Monday of the month.
You might also like:::
- NY chapter of Scripps (the women’s college) book club reads Burning Furiously Beautiful
- How to murder a woman’s sense of worth
- VIDA does a great job tracking women writers
- Vice’s suicide poet: Elise Cowen
“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.” ~Michel Foucault
12 Oct“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.”
~Michel Foucault
Happy Bloomsday 2014!
16 Jun
Doesn’t James Joyce look dapper?!
Happy Bloomsday!!
James Joyce set his rambling modern novel Ulysses on June 16, and today literary lovers around the world celebrate the iconic Irish author with marathon readings (it is about 265,000 words long!) and pub crawls. The raucous literary holiday takes its name from the central character of the novel: Leopold Bloom. The title of Joyce’s book, on the other hand, comes from the Latin version of Odysseus. Apparently, this is because he discovered the story of The Odyssey through Charles Lamb’s children’s book adaptation, Adventures of Ulysses. Just like that cunning Greek Odysseus embarked on adventure that introduced him to a wide variety of characters, Leopold Bloom traversed Dublin and met characters that paralleled those found in The Odyssey.
I thought it would be fun to share a few beautiful and provocative quotes from James Joyce’s Ulysses:
- “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”
- “People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.”
- “She would follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was the master guide. Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free.”
- “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
- “A region where grey twilight ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars.”
Those last two quotes remind me of one of my favorite lines from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road:
- “Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
I’ve written about James Joyce’s influence on Jack Kerouac a few times before so today in celebration of Bloomsday, here are the links:
- In Is Jack Kerouac a Modern Heir of James Joyce? I take a stab at offering Kerouac up to a question posed by The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
- In When Two Words Become One, I write about Joyce’s and Kerouac’s word amalgamations and daringly suggest that writers should tweak and invent their own words.
- In Homer and Kerouac, I provide a few links that show how the character of Odysseus has popped up in literature, including James Joyce’s work.
- In Ramblin’ Jack: Just Because You Don’t Like a Book Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t Well Written, I compare one of the most famous quotes from On the Road to a very similar passage in Ulysses.
For Bloomsday activities around the globe, check out The James Joyce Centre Dublin. I want to highlight a few that I found particularly relevant to the themes I write about:
- In Athens, there will be a free screening of a poetical film based on Joyce’s Greek notebooks.
- In Manhattan, Symphony Space is putting on an event that features Malachy McCourt, Colum McCann, Cynthia Nixon and others.
- In Brooklyn, there will be a pub crawl.
- In St. Petersburg (the Florida city where Jack Kerouac died), there will be readings and performances.
Have you ever participated in a Bloomsday event? What is your favorite quote by James Joyce?
The Quote that Stuck with Me
19 Dec
On Tuesday I posted about the 10 Books That Have Stuck with Me. From those books, there is one quote that’s stuck with me the most. It’s from Saul Bellow’s The Dangling Man. The truth is, I don’t even remember the book all that well, but this quote spoke to me when I was sixteen and living in the suburbs of New Jersey, my daily life a boring routine:
It may be that I am tired of having to identify a day as “the day I asked for a second cup of coffee,” or “the day the waitress refused to take back the burned toast,” and so want to blaze it more sharply, regardless of the consequences. Perhaps, eager for consequences.
I wasn’t the type of person back then who would even send back a piece of burned toast. …I’m still not. I was terribly fearful of consequences. Too fearful to even act most of the time. I tried to be invisible, to blend into the background, to not be seen by my teachers or my peers. I was too afraid. Too afraid of attention. Too afraid at failing. Too afraid at even succeeding (no one likes a know-it-all overachiever).
I had actually gotten turned on to Saul Bellow from The Counting Crows. (Hey, I’m not the only one!) In The Counting Crows song “Rain King,” inspired by Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, Duritz sings:
I belong anywhere but in between
I loved the passion of Bellow’s and Duritz’s characters, but they were not me. I related more to another line from Duritz’s most famous song, “Mr. Jones“:
Grey is my favorite color
I wasn’t a black-or-white person. I didn’t like extremes. I liked the grey, the in between–the safe.
But I was bored. So bored. I could relate to Bellow’s character who wanted a life that consisted of more than just a mild aberration of the routine.
I don’t blame New Jersey or suburban life. Though it was really hard to have a life when you go to school for eight hours a day and then come home to several more hours of homework each night, I can’t even just blame that because I can’t say that I did anything extraordinary in the free time that I did have. I went to the mall. I went to the library. I went to Blockbusters and rented videos with my friends.
It really wasn’t until I left and moved out to California and began taking chances that my life changed. I began to feel more fulfilled as I reached for the things that truly made me happy. I began doing more, choosing more.
All these years later, living in “the city that never sleeps,” I worry I don’t embrace New York City enough. I worry that because I work late hours in the office or find myself at the grocery store instead of at the latest hotspot that I’m not living life to the fullest. That my life is defined by the day there was zucchini bread in the office kitchen or the day the lights eerily went out in the subway for a thirty seconds. And yet sometimes I’m at my happiest when I decide to read a book instead of going out.
I’m not so afraid of living life anymore, but sometimes I still like the grey, the in between, the routine of toast and coffee.
* * *
Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” is now available as an ebook and paperback!
David Amram On Contributing Our Gifts
3 DecIt was musician David Amram’s birthday last month, and he left the most inspiring message in the comments section on my blog. Since a lot of readers don’t go back and reread the comments on blogs, I want to draw attention to what he said because its worth paying attention to. It’s worth really meditating on. You can read his entire comment here, but I’ll highlight a few things in particular.
On what we should be doing with our time here on earth:
I am still searching for some wisdom, and recently realized that when you get as close to Methusala City as I am, and try to figure out what it all means, you realize that the most important thing for us to do in this life is to make SOME kind of contribution while we are here.
On our gifts:
And we all have something worth sharing with others, but often our dreams appear to be hopeless to experts who themselves have often given up hope.
[…] We are all born with gifts.
On persevering:
I hope my efforts will inspire young kids to hang in there FOR LIFE, especially when they are told by their career councilors that they should give up before they have had a chance to even get started.
On taking action:
So when young kids come to me and say “I wish i had been around when knew and worked with all these fantastic people. i wish i had lived during that time”, i always tell them what Charlie Parker told me in my basement apartment in 1952 in Washington D.C. when i asked him what it was like to have his song “Now’s the Time” (which he had composed seven years earlier in 1945)
“It’s just the way it should ” he said. “Now was and will always be the time because Now is the RIGHT time!”
My own birthday is coming up, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve done with my life and what I want to do with my life. I’ve been thinking about how I spend my time and what my goals and dreams are. Sometimes dreams feel impossibly unobtainable. Sometimes they feel like work. Work gets a bad rap. So does dreaming, for that matter. I think, though, that it’s essential to dream, and it’s crucial to work towards those dreams.
As David said, “We are all born with gifts.” Therefore I believe it is our responsibility to contribute them.
I think we often wait for a reason to change or start something new. After the holidays, we’ll exercise. At the New Year, we’ll make our resolutions. Next November, we’ll write our novel. In a different season of our lives, we’ll make time to volunteer more. And then when we fail to meet our own expectations, we wait for the next big marker to begin again. Every minute of every day is a gift. We have the chance to become who we want to be TODAY. We can start using our gifts RIGHT NOW. Sure, over time, our gifts will be honed that much more and we might look back and cringe at our past efforts, but without those past efforts we won’t get to where we need to be.
“Now’s the time.”
* * *
Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” is now available as an ebook and paperback!
Kalo Mina! October 2013!
1 Oct
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
Kalo mina! Happy October 1st! The first day of fall was September 22, but the weather today feels more like late spring. The sky is a bright, bright blue, the color of parakeet feathers. I walked down to Union Square at lunch today and was tempted to play hookey just so I could sit in the grass and look up at the sky and dream.
September brought routine back to the city, and it was a busy month. A few highlights:
- Attending Greek American Fashion Week and seeing the latest collections by Tatiana Raftis, Angelo Lambrou, Nikki Poulos, and Stratton, with hair by Christo Curlisto
- Seeing Jonathan Collins’ Beat Traveller art exhibit in Paterson with Larry Closs
- Conducting a live interview with Tim Z. Hernandez about his book Manana Means Heaven at the Spanish Harlem bookstore La Casa Azul and getting to meet all the great people who work at the bookstore as well as Tim’s insightful agent
- Reading one of my personal essays about road trips, homelessness, and God as Jason Harrod softly strummed guitar at his album release party
- Retreating to Connecticut for the Scripps TriState alumni book club
- Attending the Brooklyn Book Festival with friends whom I co-lead a monthly writing workshop with and getting to hear Justin Torres read from We the Animals again. He’s brilliant. I’m obsessed
- Watching Into the Wild. I know I’m late to the game on this one, but at least I had read the book by Jon Krakauer before. The film devastated me. It was beautiful and painful and haunting and true, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days….
- Brunching with author Isobella Jade
- Hearing Davy Rothbart read from My Heart Is an Idiot. I once wrote that a story of his made me “wonder if Rothbart might be my generation’s Jack Kerouac.” Yep, he’s that good. I was too shy to talk to Davy, but I met his dad and, despite my efforts to become invisible at the mere mention of audience participation, Brett Loudermilk selected me out of the audience to pull a sword out of him. Yes, you read that right
- Reading Kristiana Kahakauwila’s story collection This Is Paradise — this is Literature. I am savoring it
- Discovering H&M Home — whoops! There went all my money!
- Finally getting Internet set up at my new place
- Talked to my sister for the first time since she moved out of New York City
- Imbibing my first pumpkin spice latte of the fall
- Attending A Global Conversation: Why the UN Must Focus on Women’s Leadership
- Oh and launching the e-book edition of Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” with Paul Maher Jr!!!
So yeah, that was my September. What about you? Did you read any good books? See any movies that moved you?
Artists, Like Greek Gods
4 Mar
“Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.”
~ Oscar Wilde
Where Is Knowledge Inherent?
28 Nov“Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks and the birds and animals that shared, alike with us, the storms and blessings of the earth….”
~ Luther Standing Bear, Lakota tribe
I read this quote in The Sacred Wisdom of the American Indians by Larry J. Zimmerman and thought it was just lovely.
10 Quotes about Persevering and Finding Your Story
21 NovI’ve never been intimidated by a blank page or a brand new diary. When I was younger and in elementary school, I relished in-class writing assignments. Inspiration and ideas came easily to me, and I wrote fast and furious. Perhaps this is because I was a quiet student, who probably went days without speaking in class, so writing assignments gave me a chance to let loose all the thoughts that had been bottled up inside my head.
Most of the time when I sit down to write, I have little idea what will come out. I almost never work off of an outline, and even when I have a thesis or a direction I want to take my work, the writing seems to have a mind of its own. I feel that my job as a writer is to just let the words flow and the story will find itself. If I try to wrestle my words down to keep to some preconceived notion of what I am expected to say, I run the risk of missing something purer and truer.
Much more intimidating to me than the blank page is a work in progress. Are my words rebelling against my story and leading me astray? Has everything I’ve said been gibberish?
Below are famous literary quotes about persevering and finding form and structure:
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. ~William Faulkner
There is no method except to be very intelligent. ~T. S. Eliot
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. ~Hart Crane
Something that you feel will find its own form. ~Jack Kerouac
The task of a writer consists in being able to make something out of an idea. ~Thomas Mann
If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one…he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent. ~Honore de Balzac
Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer. ~Ray Bradbury
It is perfectly okay to write garbage–as long as you edit brilliantly. ~C. J. Cherryh
Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it… ~Michael Crichton
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good. ~William Faulkner
Do you plot out your entire work before you begin writing?
Yiasou!
Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer, editor, writing teacher, and speaker based in New York City.
She is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of "Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road.'"
You can email her at stephanie_701 {@} yahoo.com
Stephanie Nikolopoulos 