Author: roseenahussain
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‘During the day Ennis looked across a great gulf and sometimes saw Jack, a small dot moving across a high meadow, as an insect moves across a tablecloth; Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain.’ – Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain
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‘The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.’ – Willa Cather
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‘I suppose even a woman’s hatred is a kind of love.’ – Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness
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‘Mother, Father, always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.’ – Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
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‘Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field – it was always there – where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.’ – Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
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‘I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases – a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy,…
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‘Some of the most celebrated passages in literature are those whose cadences move us in ways that reinforce and finally transcend their content. The sentences affect us much as music does, in ways that cannot be explained. Rhythm gives words a power that cannot be reduced to, or described by, mere words.’ – Francine Prose,…
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‘As I wrote, I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls “putting every word on trial for its life”: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma, and putting the comma back in.’ – Francine Prose, Reading…
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‘I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it’s not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly…
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‘When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree. When my mother explained it, I kept after her: What are you saying? What do you…
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‘Every time I sit at my desk, I look at my dictionary, a Webster’s Second Unabridged with nine million words in it and think, All the words I need are in there; they’re just in the wrong order.’ – Fran Lebowitz, A Humourist at Work, The Paris Review
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‘I’m such a slow writer I have no need for anything as fast as a word processor. I don’t need anything so snappy. I write so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself… I have a real aversion to machines. I write with a pen. Then I read it to…
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‘Before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? What a thin slice of watermelon.’ – Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
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‘I think every book I’ve done has tried to be different; this is what I set out to do, because I believe in the complexity of the human story and that there’s no way you can tell that story in one way and say, This is it. Always there will be someone who can tell…
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‘I am not an early-morning person; I don’t like to get out of bed, and so I don’t begin writing at five A.M., though some people, I hear, do. I write once my day has started. And I can work late into the night, also. Generally, I don’t attempt to produce a certain number of…
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‘It is like wrestling; you are wrestling with ideas and with the story. There is a lot of energy required. At the same time, it is exciting. So it is both difficult and easy. What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing. I have…
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‘Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don’t then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story. At some point it seems as if you are not as much in command, in control, of events as you thought…
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‘There’s something that happens in the moment of creation of a good sentence, or a good swath of sentences, that feels like the dropping away of self. Somebody else shows up and that person is better than the normal, everyday you. I’m guessing that the various approaches to writing are ultimately all about getting to…
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‘I exist mostly to one side of time. Only in rare moments – for example, when I am with those I love or in times of great exuberance or when I am writing and the work is going well – do I feel in time, that I am where I am meant to be and…
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‘Perhaps learning a new language is a reminder of when we were unable to say anything at all, when we did not have the means to communicate that we were hungry or cold or simply bewildered, and some of that distress must remain and is enlivened by occasions of inarticulacy. But it must also be…
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‘If I stop and think of the people closest to me, of where they might be at this exact moment, what they might be up to, how they might be feeling, what might be preoccupying their thoughts, the weight of their concerns, I become incapable of doing anything else. It is a truly debilitating state.…
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‘Implicit in the act of creation is praise, of discovering and naming the world, of acknowledging it, of saying it exists. The French artist Henri Cartier-Bresson had once described taking a photograph as saying ‘yes’, not the ‘yes’ of approval but that of acknowledgment.’ – Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena
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‘Now it was warmer and she was opening more rooms, airing the dark reaches, letting sunlight dry all the dampness. Some nights she opened doors and slept in rooms that had walls missing. She lay on the pallet on the very edge of the room, facing the drifting landscape of stars, moving clouds, wakened by…
Roseena Veronika Hussain 