Kay Ryan Quotes
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Forgetting takes space. Forgotten matters displace as much anything else as anything else. We must skirt unlabeled crates as thought it made sense and take them when we go to other states.
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It’s important to have your private enjoyments because sometimes that’s all we have.
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A thing cannot be delivered enough times: this is the rule of dogs for whom there are no fool's errands. To loop out and come back is good all alone. It's gravy to carry a ball or a bone.
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BAIT GOAT There is a distance where magnets pull, we feel, having held them back. Likewise there is a distance where words attract. Set one out like a bait goat and wait and seven others will approach. But watch out: roving packs can pull your word away. You find your stake yanked and some rough bunch to thank.
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I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy.
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Even in climes without snow one cannot go foward sometimes. Things test you. You are part of the Donners or part of the rescue: a muleteer in earflaps; a formerly hearty Midwestern farmer perhaps. Both parties trapped within sight of the pass.
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Tenderness and rot tenderness and rot share a border. And rot is an aggressive neighbor whose iridescence keeps creeping over. No lessons can be drawn from this however. One is not two countries. One is not meat corrupting. It is important to stay sweet and loving.
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Stardust is the hardest thing to hold out for. You must make of yourself a perfect plane - something still upon which something settles - something like sugar grains on something like metal, but with none of the chill. It’s hard to explain.
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If we have not struggled as hard as we can at our strongest how will we sense the shape of our losses or know what sustains us longest or name what change costs us, saying how strange it is that one sector of the self can step in for another in trouble, how loss activates a latent double, how we can feed as upon nectar upon need?
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Failure: the renewable resource.
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The satisfactions of agreement are immediate as sugar - a melting of the granular, a syrup that lingers, shared not singular. Many prefer it.
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A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
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It’s hard not to jump out instead of waiting to be found. It’s hard to be alone so long and then hear someone come around. It’s like some form of skin’s developed in the air that, rather than have torn, you tear.
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Small presses take chances. Chances are at the heart of all the literature we later know as great.
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What keeps me writing is that I can only know through writing. My major sense organ is apparently a pencil.
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How can you tell at the start what you can give away and what you must hold to your heart. What is the well and what is a cup. Some people get drunk up.
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I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly - and with very little financial encouragement - saving lives and minds. I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, with the possible exception of the bicycle.
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Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable. A place with its own harvest.
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It seems like many people think that if you drive yourself crazy, then you can write. I’m absolutely not interested in that. It made sense to me to be as whole and well as I could be, and as happy. I wanted to see what a fortunate life would produce. What writing would come out of a mind that didn’t try to torment itself? What did I have to know? What did I have to do rather than what can I torment and bend myself into doing? What was the fruit on that tree?
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Birds that love high trees and winds and riding flailing branches hate ledges as gripless and narrow, so that a tail is not just no advantage but ridiculous, mashed vertical against the wall. You will have seen the way a bird who falls on skimpy places lifts into the air again in seconds – a gift denied the rest of us when our portion isn't generous.
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A too closely watched flower blossoms the wrong color. Excess attention to the jonquil turns it gentian. Flowers need it tranquil to get their hues right. Some only open at midnight.
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One can't work by limelight. A bowlful right at one's elbow produces no more than a baleful glow against the kitchen table. The fruit purveyors whole unstable pyramid doesn't equal what daylight did.
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Gaps don't just happen. There is a generative element inside them, a welling motion as when cold waters shoulder up through warmer oceans. And where gaps choose to widen, coordinates warp, even in places constant since the oldest maps.
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A lot of the job that one has to do as a writer is to protect the thing that doesn't match the world.