No Matter Where You Go, There You Are

First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page ‘til you can’t see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.

—T.C. Boyle (via writingquotes)

millionsmillions: This is a tricky subject. Bringing up the women’s question — I mean the women’s fiction question — is not unlike mentioning the national debt at a dinner party. “Some people will get annoyed and insist it’s been talked about too much and inaccurately, and some will think it really matters. When I refer to so-called women’s fiction, I’m not applying the term the way it’s sometimes used: to describe a certain type of fast-reading novel, which sets its sights almost exclusively on women readers and might well find a big, ready-made audience. I’m referring to literature that happens to be written by women. But some people, especially some men, see most fiction by women as one soft, undifferentiated mass that has little to do with them.” Meg Wolitizer, “The Second Shelf.” See also: Deena Drewis’s “What we call what Women Write”

millionsmillions:

This is a tricky subject. Bringing up the women’s question — I mean the women’s fiction question — is not unlike mentioning the national debt at a dinner party. “Some people will get annoyed and insist it’s been talked about too much and inaccurately, and some will think it really matters. When I refer to so-called women’s fiction, I’m not applying the term the way it’s sometimes used: to describe a certain type of fast-reading novel, which sets its sights almost exclusively on women readers and might well find a big, ready-made audience. I’m referring to literature that happens to be written by women. But some people, especially some men, see most fiction by women as one soft, undifferentiated mass that has little to do with them.”

Meg Wolitizer, “The Second Shelf.”

See also: Deena Drewis’s “What we call what Women Write”

People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image; By asking what does this mean? …they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.

—Rene Magritte  (via spycnsweet, phoenix-eyes)