the writing life

i've been reading the writing life by annie dillard lately, and as much as she dispels the romantic notion we sometimes have about being a writer, she has still managed to inspire me. inspired me to be a more consistent, more interesting, more powerful and meaningful blog writer. inspired me to move to a small hut somewhere on the beach and finally, seriously undertake writing a novel.

some favourite quotes from her book thus far..

oh and just saying... i love the smell of old books, nothing better. and new books, depending on where you get them. it's those in between books you have to look out for! ha.

ok quotes...

"Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees. The furniture is in place; you go back for your thermos of coffee. Then, wincing, you step out again through the French doors and sit down on the chair and look over the desktop. You can see clear to the river from here in the winter. Your pour yourself a cup of coffee.
Birds fly under your chair. In spring, when the leaves open in the maples' crowns, your view stops in the treetops just beyond the desk; yellow warblers hiss and whisper on the high twigs, and catch flies. Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking that flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair."

I love that. I wish my desk at work was in midair. Sadly it is painfully grounded.

"I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order--willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern."

Interesting.