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N Quotes

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All N Quotes

“No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.”

“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”

“No, you become a man when you first decide to put away the things of childhood, the talk of childhood, and the thoughts of childhood. You decide because you cannot be treated as both a man and a boy. Because you are either one or the other, but you are not both . . .”

“No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else—and the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.”

“No, you two always get in the way of my brilliance,” the Chrome man said to himself, looking at his wife and daughter, stabbing the heart in the center of the table with a fork. “I have no human heart anymore, and you cannot torture me.” Hubert cut the heart, filleting it, yet there was no blood or Chrome liquid; it was empty. Then, Hubert threw the heart at the wall, but it returned to the table like it was not cut at all. Then the room became dark, and Hubert’s face dishevels, and he drinks more tea. There is one dim light in the room as he does so, with his face toward the table. Sennin appeared only to Dorothy’s eye, saying, “See how discontent in one room brings ruin?” Dorothy replied as she approached the next door, gentle and softly, “More like blissful delusion.”