by kiernana | Favorites, Writer's Life
Ahh… writers we have a love of words. They take us on a journey into untold worlds, they fuel our imaginations, they lift us up and make us swoon with desire… that we may be able to write to make others stop everything even if only for a moment. To stop everything and be wholly in the universe of letters we string together… to touch some part of people’s hearts wounded, or aching, or yearning for that moment to be fully present and lost in a dream of what could be all at the same time.
Maybe even just for a chuckle, a smile, a subtle lift at the corners of the mouth and a brief twinkle in the eyes. A sigh, an aha, a respite. A moment when everything shifts into a new perspective. Sweetness. A whisper in the dark. The ground beneath moves. Passion invigorating movement. Stillness.
Writers love to invent, weave, dream, communicate. We write because we need to. It’s something we must do, because not to is death to our soul. But occasionally our muse slips away, and we find our inspiration waning, our mind’s sleepy and lethargic. During times like this a collection of inspirational quotes from other writers who’ve gone before us, who’ve likely experienced the emptiness too could be just the thing we need to get our juices flowing again.
Here are some of my favourite quotes about writing to help put the pen back in your hand, or fingers to the keyboard with renewed passion.
“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
—James Michener
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
—Anaïs Nin
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
—William Wordsworth
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
—Franz Kafka
“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
—Maya Angelou
“If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
—Toni Morrison
“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen
“The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.”
—Agatha Christie
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
—Anne Frank
“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”
—Maya Angelou
“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”
—William Faulkner
“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
—Ray Bradbury
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
—Stephen King
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
―Louis L’Amour
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worse enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
—Sylvia Plath
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
—Natalie Goldberg
“That’s the thing about books, they let you travel without moving your feet.”
—Jhumpa Lahiri
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I am afraid of.”
—Joss Whedon
“If it’s still in your mind it is worth taking the risk.”
—Paulo Coelho
“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”
—Anaïs Nin
“If I waited for perfection I would never write a word.”
—Margaret Atwood
“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”
—Cyril Connolley
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”
—William Faulkner
“I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.”
—Pearl S. Buck
“You can’t blame a writer for what the characters say.”
—Truman Capote
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
—Joan Didion
“There is no denying the wild horse in us.”
—Virginia Woolf
“No need to force yourself to do something the “right way” if it’s not your right way. Your job is to honor your process.”
—Andi Cumbo Floyd
“Give me books, fruit, French wine, fine weather and a little music.”
—John Keats
“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.”
―Beatrix Potter
“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things.”
—Anne Lamott
“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
– Ernest Hermingway
Do you have any favourites you’d like to add? Please comment and share!
Kiernan
by kiernana | Faith, Poetry, Writer's Life
In a world of words, I want just one.
Just one that jumps out and claims me.
One that tells a story within a story. One that speaks to the deepest darkest depths… of the heart of this writer’s life… the word that makes sense of the wild and crazy journey I’ve been on.
The word that has compelled me, sent me out into the world to find its meaning, because it existed inside of me before I understood it… and then went into hiding, but always… always it was there.
A word that has taunted me to seek it in the daily grind, in the excruciating pain that consumed me, and in the beauty of fleeting moments that I believed were sacred… but, discovered haunting loneliness instead.
Through ugly loves, choices of spirals that were misguided and flawed, because I believed in the lies that were not real, but acted against everything that on some level I knew was right.
Through beautiful loves too… loves that have given me hope in the seeking of a sustaining truth.
A word that sums it all up and turns it all upside down… inside out… makes it all right in the soul… in the breath… in the wings that hover and protect.
In the loving eye that has always kept me in sight… in the uttering of the word… in the qualities of holy… of the holiest of holies whispering.
In the gentlest of breath uttered by my ear and fluttering along my cheek that it makes me quiver.
A waft of it swirling up into my mind, down into the ventricles of living life pulsing with particles expanding… drawing me somewhere closer to the only known that matters.
There is a book, a second book. A memoir. It’s waiting for me to write it. It’s preparing me. I’m sifting through moments to explore it, to investigate what wants to be rescued, inviting the theme that wants to be revealed.
A word has moved ever so gently in… and onto a Post-it Note where I can gaze upon it, and give it space to shape its essence.
I was visiting my parents this week. It was a good day, a good visit. I brought out their tin of photographs and let their memories come alive. I had mum write names on the back of the old tattered black and white photos.
I listened to tales of long long ago. Eager and attentive to catch glimpses of parts of them I never saw, never knew. Maybe I would learn something that would help in the making of sense.
Then my breath caught and my eyes wettened, not quite spilling over, but close. There in the listening grew a certain amount of anxiety in me, maybe even panic.
Their recollections… their memories… their sagas would soon be lost. Where would they go? What tales would I remember, or not remember, because so often in the grasping to hold near what is dear, it slips away.
Where do all of our lives… just us ordinary folks… the memories of them… where do they go? Generation after generation?
Does it matter? I don’t know.
But, I began to comprehend that there was so much that I didn’t yet know about them. At 92 and 88 time is running out for me to find out.
Short catching breaths.
What happens if our family tree dies off? Who will remember? So many precious moments… where do they go? What meaning do they have… in their having once been… and then no more?
Maybe I should make time for more visits. Maybe I should write these recollections down… capture them somehow. So much to be grateful for that I have been blind to all my life.
Where we hurt. Our trials, our suffering, our rage, our injustices.
What if they are meant to be our gift and our strength. If only we look up and see through the eyes of God’s love. We might see something altogether different.
In a world of words, I want just one. No flashy subtitles. Just one word.
Maybe… because…
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
~ John 1:1
This one sentence, it speaks to me daily. It informs me in ways I do not understand yet. Somehow, I feel it defines my life, or the life that I am in the unfolding.
The Word… the word… it gives itself to me. It chases me. It’s so good to me. It presents itself as a mountain to climb and a living water to swim in. It creates me alive.
In a world of words, I want just one. May it be so.
I wonder… if you had a word that told your story, what would it be?
In abiding love,
Kiernan
by kiernana | Artful Living, Contemporary Art, Faith
It is a happy day because His Love Endures Forever.
Every day is a happy day in this knowing… even in the midst of the mess… in the silence as my soul awaits for God alone to instruct me in His Word.
His Word… how did it come so alive in me?
One day I wanted nothing to do with it… I did try on occasion to read the Holy Book, but the words… they were garbled. I’d read and re-read and re-read because I couldn’t make them out.
What did they say? What were these confusing words? I’d put it all away, shaking my head, wondering what it was all about, and thinking it obviously wasn’t for me.
Something changed all that. Something I can only explain as His time… to call upon me… to say enough.
Enough of the seeking in all the wrong places. Enough of the years going by in circles, repeating patterns.
Enough of a lifetime of never feeling enough… of doubts… and aloneness, an aching aloneness even where love was everywhere… because worldly love is not the same as His Love.
One day a tap on the shoulder came… a whisper of hope, of love, of peace in the darkness.
Jesus.
He made Himself known to me. He encouraged me to call upon Him in my times of need. He said He was here to help us… in this world. There seemed to be an urgency about it.
He told me to draw Him close and not let go. He walked with me and somehow, He filled me up with hope… with teachings on a new way to live, in the knowing that He loved me.
He loved me?
He. Loved. Me.
My heart quickened. It softened. It opened. Calling upon Him… talking to Him… sharing all that tormented me in my brokenness.
And the Holy Book began coming alive in me…. In my fingertips as I turned the pages… in my eyes that thirsted for the Light coming off the Words… in my heart that filled up with a need to spill over… up, up, up the rivers flowed.
Now, the Words… they are the air I breathe. They live in me. Every. Day. They are my daily bread.
His very Word spoken to me.
“For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. You know how we lived among you for your sake. You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit.”
~ 1 Thessalonians 1:4-6
Oh yes!
What means this? How is it possible?
There were times in my dark hours, when I’d think of Him and His hand extended… my head bowed… my breathing hilting and labored… pain ruling my body… my ache for the ways I could not make me feel love for myself, and for all the ways this ache hit upon others as surely as a tongue lashing or a beating with fists.
And, I asked myself, “What have I got to lose?” in the reaching out and accepting the hand tendered.
This Way. This Truth. This Light. Stretching out from fingers to air to me. I took His hand, and He became my strength.
I didn’t understand it all. Surely, I didn’t.
I could never understand all the talk about Jesus having died for our sins. I could not wrap my head around that one. It made no sense to me.
I acknowledged Jesus existed. I acknowledged that he died on the cross. But, what sins? How could his death over 2,000 years ago have anything to do with me?
It took months of studying the scriptures and watching movies about the Bible and Jesus… it took me having to recite the events of His life time and again… it took my own life review, praying and making amends… understanding that sin was really anything that kept me from experiencing God’s Love (God’s Love is always there and always endures but that doesn’t mean we EXPERIENCE it, does it?) to make sense of it.
Then one day, as surely as the Holy Book claimed me… it came. I could look into His heart, as He could look into mine. His breath became the air I breathed. His Presence… the Living Waters of which I drank, and it felled me.
It felled me.
Love filled the aching emptiness and broke everything wide open… the mind… the heart… the soul. Wide. Deep. High. Open.
And, I understood the grace of his death was my saving. Does that make sense? I’m reading these words just written, and I don’t know… do they convey what it is for an anguished pounding heart delivered into a new life? From numbness, empty living to everlasting… ever eternal peace and joy?
His death for Love. His death for kindnesses. His death for peace. His death for Truth. His death for All.
His Risen.
Rises in each one of us who is ready and called to believe in the power of Love.
I can see the Love in His eyes. I can feel the Love in His walk with me… in His talk with me… in His heart that finds mine.
What is it like to surrender my ways, my will for the Holy?
I am found. I am new. I have new life.
I am defined by His promises, which are many… and, shaped by His Word.
So yes, oh happy day. Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow. To live, with all that comes with life, the loves and losses… in the knowing that His Love Endures Forever.
In the knowing that He Loves Me… and He Loves You, even if you’ve never heard His name… He Loves you too.
So yes, oh happy day. As brush to paint in the making of this piece ‘His Love Endures Forever’ – a little something to celebrate Him in glory. I’ve got a frame in mind to affix this (heavy textured paper) piece to… please pray I don’t wreck it in the process.
His Love Endures Forever | 18 x 24″ Acrylic on Paper
Heart to heart, love to love, may His face shine upon you,
Kiernan
xoxo
