writing quotes

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us."
--Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 1/27/04

"That which would give light must endure burning."
--Victor Frankel

"The true art of memory is the art of attention."
--Dr. Samuel Johnson

All of the above collected in Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking about Difficult Stories by Loren Niemi and Elizabeth Ellis

And Stacie wonders if I overthink things!?

1977
From a 1977 letter to my housemates:
Not meaning to sound too esoteric, etc., but Penny and I have been working a lot on what might be called aligning the subjective with the objective. We’ve been focusing on how we both shut each other out in fear when it’s really only our illusions we have to fear—not reality itself. It’s a hard process to break down the illusions because they’ve become part of us, even though they cause us to work against our best interests. And at the bottom of those illusions is perfectionism. Neither of us will really let go and trust the other person until she reaches perfection. In the meantime, though, there’s a lot we still want from each other—so we finally reach and ask, but in such a defensive, suspicious way that the desired results become highly unlikely. Slowly, we’re starting to break the patterns. That feels GOOD