Quotes About Inspiration

An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.

It is often mild distraction that moves imagination forward, not uninterrupted concentration. Thinking then works by indirection, sauntering in a roundabout way to places it cannot reach directly.

What we dream of is already present in the world.

I set out to write books, to be surrounded by generous, brilliant people, and to have great adventures.

William Stegner...coined the term 'the geography of hope,' countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could be a place in which everyone could locate their hopefulness even if few actually entered it.

I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It wanted to be written; it was restless for the racetrack; it galloped along once I sat down at the computer.

A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways.

Young feminists are a thrilling phenomenon: smart, bold, funny defenders of rights and claimers of space—and changers of the conversation.

B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.

After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas...

Making a poem is like making a chair; a poem is as real as a chair and sometimes more useful.

I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played. I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and not just facts and solid objects. I wanted to map how the world is connected by patterns and intuitions and resemblances. I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world is broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.

The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.

Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

Woolf gave us limitlessness, impossible to grasp, urgent to embrace, as fluid as water, as endless as desire, a compass by which to get lost.

Certain kinds of beauty make people weep, the moments "when hope and history rhyme

Listen to what makes your hair stand on end, your heart melt, and your eyes go wide, what stops you in your tracks and makes you want to live, wherever it comes from, and hope that your writing can do all those things for other people.

When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time.

If you're lucky, you carry a torch into that dark of Virginia Woolf's, and if you're really lucky you'll sometimes see to whom you've passed it, as I did on that day (and if you're polite, you'll remember who handed it to you).

Ernest Hemingway is also in my non-read zone, because if you learn a lot from Gertrude Stein, you shouldn't be a homophobic, antisemitic misogynist.

I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It wanted to be written; it was restless for the racetrack; it galloped along once I sat down at the computer.

Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life. Those excluded influences I call the grandmothers.

A pair of glasses on which the temperature and chance of rain pops up or someone's trying to schedule me for a project or a drink is not going to help with reveries about justice, meaning, and the beautiful deep marine blue of nearly every dusk.

A desk is no place to think on the large scale.