"You know, there are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them. I mean, so what if two roads go two ways in a wood? So what? Who cares if it made all that big a difference? What difference? And why should I have to guess what the difference is? Isn't that what he's supposed to say?

"Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?"

(Okay for Now)

Time is the only critic without ambition.

This book was written using 100% recycled words.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

You stole that from Tolkein. Use your own ideas.

(Fire and Hemlock)

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.

...You, who are so adept at the lovely polishing of every grave and lucent phrase, will realized the magnitude of the task which confronted me when I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible. (Cold Comfort Farm)

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

…Philip Pullman has said that your life begins when you are born, and your story begins when you discover that you have been born into the wrong family by mistake.

But when does the life of a storyteller begin?

Mine began when I was about six. Up until then, I had half-believed that my mother could read my thoughts. But at some point during first grade, I realized that I was completely alone in my own consciousness. I used to regularly freak myself out by sitting still, closing my eyes, and asking myself the same question over and over until I was in a sort of trance. The question was, How am I me?

What I meant was, How did my particular self get in here? Again and again, I would close my eyes and plunge myself into this existential angst. Why did I do it? I think that, like someone alone in a dark room, I was feeling around for a door. Because I really, really did not want to be alone in there.

( And I did find a door, eventually. )

I am not young enough to know everything.

The fundamental thing that all critical reading does is reveal to us that there are not easy definitions that distinguish Us from Them. Reading with an eye toward metaphor allows us to become the person we're reading about while reading about them. That's why there are symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if the author intended a symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author's intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves.



Life is like pizza, Jade, life is like pizza :)

Previously from John Green: "There is no Them. There are only facets of Us." I have discovered that I need an LJ feed of John Green's YouTube channel (anyone have one? Off I go to search).

Also: I am vindicated!

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

"If by now you're a little confused, don't be too hard on yourself. Life is confusing, and anyone who claims that she has all the answers has probably uncovered the wrong ones." (Inside the Shadow City)