Quotes from Kim Addonizio

The truth is, life is difficult and intense. The beauty is that we have art and love to give us solace, and joy, a reason to live and a reason to care about what happens in, and to, the world.

You have a vision. The stink of the opossum, or possibly the Kodiak bear, is rising into the air around you, and there is something you absolutely need to say. No one is asking you to say it. You know that, and yet here you are, an army ready to do battle with the forces of silence.

Will the waters be rising soon? The waters will be rising soon. Find someone or something to cling to.

We lose June. We lose July. In August we look in mirrors and want to die.

I walk into Summerville and no matter what my mood is it instantly drops about thirty degrees.

And you sit listening, and nodding, like those toys I've seen, their heads on springs. It's too ridiculous, this ordering the noise the past makes into music. What's it for? Time's up. You're in the house. I'm through the door.

I'm alone all day. In the afternoon, thunder... the sky stitches together the loose scraps of dark.

Then someone finished a story, someone else paused to think of the right word, and a silence opened and spread through the brightly lit room.

Details convince; they persuade us that the writer has looked closely at the world, and they bring us close to the world the writer is creating.

I explained already about suffering and about each one of you, destined to be isolate and alone because writing is lonely work

Know the difference between its and it's, between lay and lie: you lay the form rejection slip on the table; you lie on the bed filled with the anguish of self-doubt and feelings of utter worthlessness.

But don't wait for something to happen before you begin to write; pay attention to the world around you, right now.

Good-bye to how you'd curl away in sleep, one hand to your forehead, doing the hard work of dreaming... good-bye to your drunkenness, which I admit I liked because of how you'd cry sometimes, or follow me from room to room, naked, dripping from a bath, able to say what you couldn't, sober.

Picasso said, "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

The truth is that writing is simply not reliable. You can't count on it to be there just because you've made time for it. In fact, making space might make it disappear.

Writing a novel is like having a baby. I know because I've had both, and the experiences were hellish. By comparison, the torture of the damned—plunged into excrement, boiled in blood, beheaded, set upon by harpies—are like love nips from your yippy little dog.

I'd be very good at being rich, but no one has offered to test my talents in that department. ... New York was like a wealthy, handsome, intensely artistic, complex, slightly manic man who, for some inexplicable reason, was enthralled with me. Not that I ever met a man like that. Who needed men anyway? I'll take Manhattan.

Beginning writers tend to think that craft is their enemy. As long as they believe that, they will remain beginners, no matter how many years they write.

Though now that I think about it, the workshop that day was probably focused on revision, as in Your First Draft Sucks and You Have a Thousand Do-Overs Before You Get It Right. Think of it this way: Build a city, then blow it up to save it. Invent a road to take you far out of town, then start over with one good brick.

I'll wear it like bones, like skin, it'll be the goddamned dress they'll bury me in

I'm saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it's spring and it's starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.

The teeth sold to the fairies are tombstones in the graveyard of the fireflies. By their cold caught light you can make out the big house submerged in the backyard creek, thought-minnows spinning in motes in the attic. The lovely young parents, so long preserved, are showing signs of rot, the kitten named Princess, signs of invisibilty. But look, the old dolls are doing well; they smile and smile. And the witch? Darling, the witch was real.

If God is good, how is it that the weed of evil takes root everywhere, and what is there to keep us from murdering each other in despair?

Forget wondering, Am I good enough? Can I do this? The only thing you really need to ask yourself is: Is writing my genius? If it is, then apprentice yourself.