Quote Me This (Warm Ups)

[age.livejournal.com]

Oh hey! Three days in a row! Can I make it four? *shifty eyes*

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The First Sentence First and Second Quotes
Choose: One
Writing Time: 6 minutes

Quote #1: Avarice, envy, pride,/Three fatal sparks, have set the hearts of all/On Fire. - Dante, The Divine Comedy

Quote #2: In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us. - Charles Baudelaire

The Non Sequitur Third and Fourth Quotes
Choose: One (OR choose one, write for time, choose the other, write for time)
Writing Time: 3 minutes

Quote #3: "The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it." - Elizabeth Drew

Quote #4: I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out. - Nora Ephron

The Last Straw Fifth and Sixth Quotes
Choose: One
Writing Time: 6 minutes

Quote #5: Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions. - John Morley

Quote #6: "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport." - William Shakespeare, king Lear

[Disclaimer: The above quotes belong to their respective speakers writers. We're just having a bit of fun. Not profiting, no suing, please :)]

Comments

My first time trying one of these - I had fun!

[ladybardnano.livejournal.com]

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us. We are the nobles of the people who write, etching away our lives in subtle ways, trying to make something small stand for something gargantuan, something that another lesser force might use guns and cannons and such to announce.

So I am not very good at being subtle. I have a clumsy way about me with the prose, and my mind skips and jumps to new things without pause, without letting me dwell on one thing, one simple subtlety, as a master might dwell forever on the breath of a butterfly, the twist in the stem of a rose, the way the light strikes a dewdrop just so and how it is a meaning for all of life.

And then the master's work and voice are lost with the trampling of ignorant feet. Take a spider, spinning its web, a delicate and elaborate construction of fine silk that will glisten with the dew of its web. Then come the school children, racing and trampling, and their feet and hands do not even feel the whisper of silk as they shred to bits the spider's handiwork, destroying without thought or malice the work of perhaps an entire lifetime. So too do the students of literature race brashly through haiku and other fine poems, not knowing when to savor, when to enjoy.

Once I spent an entire day watching a spider's web move in the breeze, trying to gain a sense of it, a deep sense like a master of haiku might have. But even a day is not enough time, not nearly enough time, and of course I can be as coarse and unknowing as one of those schoolchildren, not knowing what I do or where to set my feet.


"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."

After that day, though, everything seemed more vivid, more detailed. I noted the smell of the grass and earth after rain, how the clay scent hung in the air and filled my lungs with life, how the raindrops gathered on the petals and slid down the stalks of the flowers, how the entire web of the spider quaked with each softly pelting drop. I learned the differences in mud and earth, and how to read the bodies of the earthworms on the pavement. I learned to see the vividness of the emerald grass, the depth of the blues of the sky, the cacophony of color that was the world around me, the world I had seen once before with blind eyes. I was like the blind man who now could see. My eyes were opened. Not just my eyes – my ears, my feet, my nostrils, my very skin, all burst into new life.


“Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.”

Since that time, you might think, I should have been glad for my life and the beauty of all things around me. Not so. I was grieved that I could not see more, feel more, taste more – but most of all I grieved that I saw all these things alone. No one else seemed to half comprehend the world in which I now walked, the one alive with birds and insects and flowers, the one which I had learned to treasure deeply. Something within the web had shown itself to me, and now sometimes I could glimpse it in these other things as well, and they took my breath away with wonder.

But I noticed too the things that were not right in the world, that took away some of the wonder. I noticed cigarette butts lining the pavement, waiting for small creature to swallow them, or to spread their poisons into the water, leeching into the rivers and fish that flicked through the mysterious depths. I saw plastic bags blown by the wind, bags that could tangle and smother and kill. I saw the spider, whose work was tattered and destroyed.

And I saw the spider, ever patient, begin to spin again.

When the web hung in tatters, when the spider had spent its life and energy into a weaving only to have it swept away in a rush of activity, it did not sulk or mope or complain. It did not put forth an essay about how life was unfair. No, it did none of those things; it simply began to spin again, to use the empty space to weave itself a new web, a new thing of subtle beauty, with a kind of patience a saint might envy.

Spin your web again, o spider. Spin again.