Joshunda Victoria Sanders

"You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."

—James Baldwin (via ladyvenoms)

"And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about."

—Haruki Murakami (via hellanne)

"In The Orphaned Adult, Rabbi Marc D. Angel writes that adult orphans become the keeper of familial memories. We are the last ones standing. What I remembered most for years about my mother was that she had not been mother at all in any pragmatic way, and all of her support had been emotional. Her talent for hyperbole was the reason that I, even today, have a filter for praise. “Everything you touch turns to gold!” she often said. “You are beautiful. I love you. I’m so proud you belong to me."

—I Wish My Mother Would Call

"

Guernica: Do you feel like you get less attention from a literary press that is still, in some ways, pretty white?

Lynn Nottage: It’s not that I get less attention, but I get different attention. I’m still figuring this out, but I think there’s a way the press writes about our work that marginalizes it. It’s not focused on how the work speaks universally, but on me as an African-American writer. As if that’s the center of what my work is. I feel like that’s reductionist. They don’t ask Neil LaBute to talk about his whiteness, about how being a white man affects his writing. It is implicit. They ask him craft questions. They ask about the work itself.

"

—History of Omission, Dwyer Murphy interviews Lynn Nottage - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

"The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."

—Ted Hughes on Our Universal Inner Child, in a Beautiful Letter to His Son | Brain Pickings

"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."

—

Kurt Vonnegut

(via calmeetvolupte)

"A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."

—Junot Diaz (via livelearnandpanic)

"Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart."

—Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (via pavorst)

"We are not publishing our journals, or imagining ourselves to be so important that people are actually interested in the details of our lives. No. We are taking those details and lining them up, amazed, astonished, rapt the way a child might be, building blocks to form a tower. We are attempting to make sense out of what we can — to reach out a hand to the reader across a rough sea of isolation and separateness and offer up something that has shape, integrity, even beauty and symmetry. Just like life? Hardly. But that isn’t our job. ~ Dani Shapiro, On Memoir"

—Meditating on Memoir: My Beloved World, Traveling Heavy and Men We Reaped | Big Book Lover

"I can tell lonely people when I see them, and I’m very often drawn to them, because I feel that they might have some secret to tell me."

—‘Country Girl’ Edna O’Brien On A Lifetime Of Lit, Loneliness And Love : NPR