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Quote by Sarah J. Maas

Work

Crown of Midnight

In this fantasy novel, the protagonist navigates a world of magic and political intrigue as they strive to ascend to the throne, facing numerous challenges and allies along the way. more

Author

Sarah J. Maas
Sarah J. Maas

Sarah J. Maas is an American author known for her fantasy novels. Her works are celebrated for their rich imagination, complex characters, and gripping plots. Born on March 5, 1986, Maas has developed a passion for writing from a young age and has become a successful author in her own right. more

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“He wondered what would happen if he abandoned the spinster’s offer of marriage, if he could make the story’s denouement true to the strange, nuanced, open-ended and infinitely interesting life he was sharing now with Constance Fenimore Woolson, if he could make his adventurer begin to need, or half-need, the domestic life of a lodger with an intelligent and reserved woman who was lonely, but not willing to be preyed upon. She would ask him for nothing as obvious as marriage; what she wanted was a close and satisfying and, if necessary, unconventional attachment with loyalty and care and affection as well as solitude and distance.”

“Writing is no more than wending a way in an attempt to restore all of the paths that had been cut-short, headed off at the pass, de-railed, even if worded byways are more dangerous than wooded paths, even if the way of writing is ill-lit, and most of all braced by the uncertainty of solitary passage.”

“Et garde-toi des bons et des justes ! Ils aiment à crucifier ceux qui s’inventent leur propre vertu, — ils haïssent le solitaire. Garde-toi aussi de la sainte innocence ! Tout ce qui n'est pas simple lui est impie ; elle aime aussi à jouer avec le feu... des bûchers. Et garde-toi des accès de ton amour ! Trop vite le solitaire tend la main à celui qu’il rencontre. Il y a des hommes à qui tu ne dois pas donner la main, mais seulement la patte : et je veux que ta patte ait aussi des griffes. Mais le plus dangereux ennemi que tu puisses rencontrer sera toujours toi-même ; c’est toi-même que tu guettes dans les cavernes et les forêts. Solitaire, tu suis le chemin qui mène à toi-même !”

“Regarding the straying of the dwelling place, it is generally taught that in order to perfect ultimate realization of the view someone who has a temporary realization of it should go to a secluded open area, such as a mountain retreat or a charnel ground. You may temporarily possess the view, but in order to sustain it, you must stay in mountain hermitages. An unwholesome dwelling place may indeed cause your view to go astray.”

“The artist or writer does not impose harmony on reality but—with sufficient reverence and diligence and selflessness and solitude—uncovers the harmony that is always there but that we conceal from ourselves out of a preferencia for material comfort and fear of the consequences a full and unreserved embrace of harmony requires. This faith in the underlying harmony roots itself in a love of and appreciation for nature, because nature, no matter how extreme the human abuse heaped on her, embodies a quiet, continual knitting and healing of life, ever dependent on death to make herself anew. 'Art is a harmony parallel to nature,' Cézanne wrote—not identical with but parallel to nature. Art of any kind, undertaken with atención and focus and as part of a commitment to discipline, is an effort at reenactment of the original creative gesture—the precipitation of the universe at the moment of its creation. That, I believe, is why we sing, paint, dance, sculpt, write; that is why cualquier one of us sets out to create something from nothing, and why the creative impulse is essentially religious or, if you prefer, spiritual. We seek to recreate the original creative gesture, whatever or whoever set it in motion—the bringing into being of what is. We seek the center of beauty.”