Good Manuscript Quotes

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I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel Johnson
None of us can know what tomorrow will hold, because each day has its good and its bad moments.
Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
Christian does a great job helping an aspiring writer get inspired to write and finish their book. It’s easy to read and understand, and provides encouragement and specific guidance, without being too harsh or detailed on fiction writing only. If you are struggling with how to put your thoughts onto paper, give this a read and establish a rhythm for your writing. Christian’s success at completing over 21 published manuscripts while leading a busy life are testament in if there is a will, there is a way. And it provides some good humor throughout.” Rachel Braynin, Sr Program Manager at Lulu Publishing
Christian Warren Freed (So...You Want to Write a Book?)
Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel Johnson
I hid my love when young till I Couldn't bear the buzzing of a fly; I hid my life to my despite Till I could not bear to look at light: I dare not gaze upon her face But left her memory in each place; Where'er I saw a wild flower lie I kissed and bade my love good-bye.
John Clare (Poems Chiefly from Manuscript)
After all we speak of people 'taking refuge' in vagueness -the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough.
J.L. Austin (Sense and Sensibilia: Reconstructed from the Manuscript Notes by C.J. Warnock)
The point is, I can’t tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript—or painting, song, voice, dance moves, [insert passion here]—in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I guarantee you that it won’t take you anywhere. Or you could do what this writer did: Give in to your obsession instead.
Kathryn Stockett
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
Ring Lardner
It was one thing to stay in one place If you were happy and fulfilled- that was simply living the good life. But what if you weren't fulfilled?
Syrie James (The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen)
The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation—the role of chance…What I’ve learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.
Leonard Mlodinow (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives)
As good as' always spells mediocrity. But when a writer's work is in competition with all those thousands of other manuscripts that pour over an editor's desk, he cannot afford to be 'as good as'; he (or she) must be 'better than.
Phyllis A. Whitney (Guide to Fiction Writing)
Never give up. The same manuscript may appeal to one agent and not to another. It's a matter of taste, and it's all about the writing. What if I had give up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60? The point is, I can't tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript—or painting, song, voice, dance moves—in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I guarantee you that it won't take you anywhere.
Kathryn Stockett
Noone of us can know what tomorrow will hold, because each day has its good and its bad moments.
Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or—kindest of all—goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.
Shirley Jackson (Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings)
Many good people read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions, corrections, encouragement, and information.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
He is a brilliant man, said Miss Doggett. She helped him a good deal in his work, I think. Mrs. Bonner says that she even learned to type so that she could type his manuscripts for him. 'Oh, then he had to marry her,' said Miss Morrow sharply. 'That kind of devotion is worse than blackmail - a man has no escape from that.
Barbara Pym (Jane and Prudence)
But can’t I sleep here while you’re working?’ ‘You know I won’t be able to. I can’t even write with a cat in the room.’ ‘You’ve never tried with me in the room. I may have a good effect.’ Even though I was angry I couldn’t bring myself to say no. I had no right to be because what I was implying was that the miserable manuscript I was writing was more important than her. At that moment it was, but I couldn’t say that. ‘OK,’ I said.
Karl Ove Knausgård (Min kamp 2 (Min kamp, #2))
I have brought peace to this land, and security," he began. "And what of your soul, when you use the cleverness of argument to cloak such acts? Do you think that the peace of a thousand cancels out the unjust death of one single person? It may be desirable, it may win you praise from those who have happily survived you and prospered from your deeds, but you have committed ignoble acts, and have been too proud to own them. I have waited patiently here, hoping that you would come to me, for if you understood, then some of your acts would be mitigated. But instead you send me this manuscript, proud, magisterial, and demonstrating only that you have understood nothing at all." "I returned to public life on your advice, madam," he said stiffly. "Yes; I advised it. I said if learning must die it should do so with a friend by its bedside. Not an assassin.
Iain Pears (The Dream of Scipio)
Ms. Lane.”Barrons’ voice is deep, touched with that strange Old World accent and mildly pissed off. Jericho Barrons is often mildly pissed off. I think he crawled from the swamp that way, chafed either by some condition in it, out of it, or maybe just the general mass incompetence he encountered in both places. He’s the most controlled, capable man I’ve ever known. After all we’ve been through together, he still calls me Ms. Lane, with one exception: When I’m in his bed. Or on the floor, or some other place where I’ve temporarily lost my mind and become convinced I can’t breathe without him inside me this very instant. Then the things he calls me are varied and nobody’s business but mine. I reply: “Barrons,” without inflection. I’ve learned a few things in our time together. Distance is frequently the only intimacy he’ll tolerate. Suits me. I’ve got my own demons. Besides I don’t believe good relationships come from living inside each other’s pockets. I believe divorce comes from that. I admire the animal grace with which he enters the room and moves toward me. He prefers dark colors, the better to slide in and out of the night, or a room, unnoticed except for whatever he’s left behind that you may or may not discover for some time, like, say a tattoo on the back of one’s skull. “What are you doing?” “Reading,” I say nonchalantly, rubbing the tattoo on the back of my skull. I angle the volume so he can’t see the cover. If he sees what I’m reading, he’ll know I’m looking for something. If he realizes how bad it’s gotten, and what I’m thinking about doing, he’ll try to stop me. He circles behind me, looks over my shoulder at the thick vellum of the ancient manuscript. “In the first tongue?” “Is that what it is?” I feign innocence. He knows precisely which cells in my body are innocent and which are thoroughly corrupted. He’s responsible for most of the corrupted ones. One corner of his mouth ticks up and I see the glint of beast behind his eyes, a feral crimson backlight, bloodstaining the whites. It turns me on. Barrons makes me feel violently, electrically sexual and alive. I’d march into hell beside him. But I will not let him march into hell beside me. And there’s no doubt that’s where I’m going. I thought I was strong, a heroine. I thought I was the victor. The enemy got inside my head and tried to seduce me with lies. It’s easy to walk away from lies. Power is another thing. Temptation isn’t a sin that you triumph over once, completely and then you’re free. Temptation slips into bed with you each night and helps you say your prayers. It wakes you in the morning with a friendly cup of coffee, and knows exactly how you take it. He skirts the Chesterfield sofa and stands over me. “Looking for something, Ms. Lane?” I’m eye level with his belt but that’s not where my gaze gets stuck and suddenly my mouth is so dry I can hardly swallow and I know I’m going to want to. I’m Pri-ya for this man. I hate it. I love it. I can’t escape it. I reach for his belt buckle. The manuscript slides from my lap, forgotten. Along with everything else but this moment, this man. “I just found it,” I tell him.
Karen Marie Moning (Burned (Fever, #7))
One day, one of my teachers at the Abbey asked me what I did on my [5]free afternoons when I was alone. I told her I went behind my bed in an empty space which was there, and that it was easy to close myself in with my bed curtain and that “I thought.” “But what do you think about?” she asked. “I think about God, about life, about ETERNITY ... I think!” The good religious laughed heartily at me, and later on she loved reminding me of the [10]time when I thought, asking me if I was still thinking. I understand now that I was making mental prayer without knowing it and that God was already instructing me in secret.
Thérèse of Lisieux (Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux (the Little Flower) [The Authorized English Translation of Therese's Original Unaltered Manuscripts])
It isn’t the absolute truth about life and death, but the thing that helps us to live and confront the challenges of day-to-day life. It isn’t what we learn from books, which serves only to fuel futile arguments about what happened or will happen; it is the knowledge that lives in the hearts of men and women of good will
Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
Believe not because some old manuscripts are produced, believe not because it is your national belief, because you have been made to believe it from your childhood; but reason it all out, and after you have analysed it, then, if you find that it will do good to one and all, believe it, live up to it, and help others to live up to it.
Vivekananda (Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda)
None of us can know what tomorrow will hold, because each day has its good and its bad moments. So, when you ask your questions, forget about the troops outside and the fear inside. Our task is not to leave a record of what happened on this date for those who will inherit the Earth; history will take care of that. Therefore, we will speak about our daily lives, about the difficulties we have had to face. That is all the future will be interested in, because I do not believe very much will change in the next thousand years.
Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
To life lived fully: to laughter, to have loved and lost, to be remembered for the good fight.
Tim Heaton (Tetragrammaton: Cracking the Voynich Manuscript)
Ursula demanded a high caliber of work from her authors—her most notorious note left scribbled in the margins of manuscripts was N.G.E.F.Y., which stood for “Not Good Enough for You.
Mackenzi Lee (Bygone Badass Broads: 52 Forgotten Women Who Changed the World)
In the third section, A Discussion, people discuss what The Story meant to them and how they are going to use it in their work and in their lives. Some readers of this book’s early manuscript preferred to stop at the end of The Story, without reading further, and interpret its meaning for themselves. Others enjoyed reading A Discussion that follows because it stimulated their thinking about how they might apply what they’d learned to their own situation. Everyone knows that not all change is good or even necessary. But in a world that is constantly changing, it is to our advantage to learn how to adapt and enjoy something better. In any case, I hope each time you re-read Who Moved My Cheese? you will find something new and useful in the brief story, as I do, and that it will help you deal with change and bring you success, whatever you decide success is for you. I hope you enjoy what you discover, and I wish you well.
Spencer Johnson (Who Moved My Cheese?: An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life)
Atticus adjusted his glasses as he peered down at the blanket. “Hey, is that the book Nellie told us about?” Jake’s eyes flicked to Olivia’s book. “You’ve got it outside in the sun? Are you out of your minds?” Amy crossed her arms. “We’re being careful.” “It’s not about careful, this is a five-hundred-year-old manuscript! You should be wearing gloves—Atticus brought some—and keeping it out of the sunlight.” “It didn’t take you long to start barking orders!” Any exclaimed, her face flushing. “But then you always know best, don’t you?” “Somebody has to be mature in this situation,” Jake said, his gaze flashing at Ian, who was now intently trying to brush cookie crumbs off his pants. “True. In that case, we’d rather consult your little brother,” Ian said with a smirk. “Medieval manuscripts are his field, am I right?” “Technically, it’s early Renaissance,” Jake said. “Thanks for the correction, my good man. Amy is right—you do know best.” Ian slipped his arm around Amy. “She’s so perceptive. One of the many things I adore about her.” “It’s getting chilly. Why don’t we go inside?” Amy suggested brightly as she tried to step out of the circle of Ian’s arm. Ian took the opportunity to rub her shoulder. “You do feel rather cold,” he said. “Let’s sit by the fire. Jake, since you’re so interested in proper handling, why don’t you take the book?” Jake snatched up the book and furiously stomped off toward the house. “You forgot to wear gloves!” Ian called after him. Amy pushed him away. “Really, Ian.” “What a touchy guy,” Ian said. “Frankly, I don’t know what you see in him.” He winced as the kitchen door slammed, then glanced at Amy’s red face. “Hmmm. It might be a good time for me to take a walk.
Jude Watson (Nowhere to Run (The 39 Clues: Unstoppable, #1))
A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage — the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come.
Susan Orlean (The Library Book)
Now here is Gardiner, patting a manuscript as if it were the cheek of a plump baby: ‘The king will be pleased to read this. I have called it, Of True Obedience.’ ‘You had better let me see it before it goes to the printer.’ ‘The king himself will expound it to you. It shows why oaths to the papacy are of none effect, yet our oath to the king, as head of the church, is good. It emphasises most strongly that a king’s authority is divine, and descends to him directly from God.’ ‘And not from a pope.
Hilary Mantel (Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2))
Mr. Dick, listening with a face shining with pride and pleasure, in his heart of hearts, believed the Dictionary to be the most delightful book in the world. As I think of them going up and down before those school-room windows - the Doctor reading with his complacent smile, an occasional flourish of the manuscript, or grave motion of this head; and Mr. Dick listening, enchained by interest, with his poor wits calmly wandering who knows where, upon the wings of hard words - I think of it as one of the pleasantest things, in a quiet way, that I have ever seen. I feel as if they might go walking to and fro for ever, and the world might somehow be the better for it. As if a thousand things it makes a noise about, were not one-half so good for it, or me.
Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)
I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it, in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts. I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success. I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed. Heaven knows I write this, in no spirit of self-laudation. The man who reviews his own life, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and defeating him. I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I have not abused. My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules.
Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)
What Printing-presses yield we think good store, But what is writ by hand we reverence more: A Book that with this printing-blood is dyed On shelves for dust and moth is set aside, But if’t be penned it wins a sacred grace And with the ancient Fathers takes its place.
John Donne
Nature is infinitely rich and diverse in her ways. She can be seen to break her most unchanging laws. She has made self-interest the motive of all human action, but in the great host of men she produces ones who are strangely constituted, in whom selfishness is scarcely perceptible because they do not place their affections in themselves. Some are passionate about the sciences, others about the public good. They are as attached to the discoveries of others as if they themselves had made them, or to the institutions of public welfare and the state as if they derived benefit from them. This habit of not thinking of themselves influences the whole course of their lives. They don't know how to use other men for their profit. Fortune offers them opportunities which they do not think of taking up. In nearly all men the self is almost never inactive. You will detect their self-interest in nearly all the advice they give you, in the services they do for you, in the contacts they make, in the friendships they form. They are deeply attached to the things which affect their interests however remotely, and are indifferent to all others. When they encounter a man who is indifferent to personal interest they cannot understand him. They suspect him of hidden motives, of affectation, or of insanity. They cast him from their bosom, revile him.
Jan Potocki (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa)
I hate that word,” she says between fits of laughter. “Moist?” “I always change it on the manuscripts I edit … If should only be used when describing the consistency of baked goods. It should never be used to describe any part of a woman’s anatomy.” “You mean…” Inadvertently, my eyes drift to her crotch and then I shake the thought away. “Wait? What?” “Yes, I’ve seen it used to describe the women who are…” She looks up, apparently trying to think of the best word to use here, but I see where this is going. “Turned on.” “They must not be that turned on if they are just moist,” I point out… “A man should be able to get a woman wet. Drenched. Not moist.” I want to add that I’d give my right nut to see how wet I could make her. But I keep my thoughts to myself, because we’re supposed to be keeping things friendly. But fuck friendship.
Sidney Halston (Pull Me Close (Panic, #1))
As I think of them going up and down before those schoolroom windows—the Doctor reading with his complacent smile, an occasional flourish of the manuscript, or grave motion of his head; and Mr. Dick listening, enchained by interest, with his poor wits calmly wandering God knows where, upon the wings of hard words—I think of it as one of the pleasantest things, in a quiet way, that I have ever seen. I feel as if they might go walking to and fro for ever, and the world might somehow be the better for it—as if a thousand things it makes a noise about, were not one half so good for it, or me.
Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)
I only pinch books nobody is using. And I do good works, too. I rescued quite a lot of manuscripts from the library of Alexandria before it burned down. And I had a lovely chat with the librarian. She wasn’t even worried when I walked out of a black spot in the wall. People in ancient times were much more open to magic.
Cori McCarthy & Amy Rose Capetta (Sword in the Stars (Once & Future, #2))
their footfalls? Finally some combination thereof, or these many things as permutations of each other—as alternative vocabularies? However it was, by January I was winnowed, and soon dispensed with pills and analysis (the pills I was weaned from gradually), and took up my unfinished novel again, Our Lady of the Forest, about a girl who sees the Virgin Mary, a man who wants a miracle, a priest who suffers spiritual anxiety, and a woman in thrall to cynicism. It seems to me now that the sum of those figures mirrors the shape of my psyche before depression, and that the territory of the novel forms a map of my psyche in the throes of gathering disarray. The work as code for the inner life, and as fodder for my own biographical speculations. Depression, in this conceit, might be grand mal writer’s block. Rather than permitting its disintegration at the hands of assorted unburied truths risen into light as narrative, the ego incites a tempest in the brain, leaving the novelist to wander in a whiteout with his half-finished manuscript awry in his arms, where the wind might blow it away. I don’t find this facile. It seems true—or true for me—that writing fiction is partly psychoanalysis, a self-induced and largely unconscious version. This may be why stories threaten readers with the prospect of everything from the merest dart wound to a serious breach in the superstructure. To put it another way, a good story addresses the psyche directly, while the gatekeeper ego, aware of this trespass—of a message sent so daringly past its gate, a compelling dream insinuating inward—can only quaver through a story’s reading and hope its ploys remains unilluminated. Against a story of penetrating virtuosity—The Metamorphosis, or Lear on the heath—this gatekeeper can only futilely despair, and comes away both revealed and provoked, and even, at times, shattered. In lesser fiction—fiction as entertainment, narcissism, product, moral tract, or fad—there is also some element of the unconscious finding utterance, chiefly because it has the opportunity, but in these cases its clarity and force are diluted by an ill-conceived motive, and so it must yield control of the story to the transparently self-serving ego, to that ostensible self with its own small agenda in art as well as in life. * * * Like
David Guterson (Descent: A Memoir of Madness (Kindle Single))
Each story, good and bad, short or long--from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness--they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won't necessarily make sense, but at the end there'll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits.
Deb Caletti (The Story of Us)
Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don’t want to do. And if ever there was something I didn’t want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.
John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)
Stevenson had originally conceived the novel as a straightforward horror yarn, involving a thief that invents a potion that changes his physical appearance for the purpose of disguise. In a later essay, ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, Stevenson recalled how this version of the story was suggested by a dream. Disliking the initial result, which also failed to meet the approval of his wife, Fanny, Stevenson destroyed the manuscript. It is possible that it was also Stevenson’s wife who suggested that, by having the transformation happen more haphazardly, a more sophisticated story about man’s equal capacity for good and evil might be told. In any event, Stevenson grasped this idea enthusiastically, completing a new draft in three days.
Robert Louis Stevenson (Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson)
Ember at last pulled away from Nesta. But she gently put a hand to the female’s cheek and whispered, “You’ll find your way,” before walking to the portal. Bryce could have sworn there were tears in Nesta’s eyes as her mother stepped back into Midgard. But those tears were gone when Nesta met Bryce’s stare. And Cassian, like any good mate, sensed when he wasn’t wanted, and walked over to the fireplace to pretend to read some sort of old-looking manuscript. Bryce knew that, also like any good mate, if she made one wrong move, he’d rip her to shreds. Which was precisely why Hunt had come back into the room, and was watching Nesta carefully. “Alphaholes,” Nesta echoed, eyes gleaming with amusement. Bryce chuckled and drew the Starsword. Again, Cassian tensed, but Bryce just offered it to Nesta. The female took it, blinking. “You said you had an eight-pointed star tattooed on you,” Bryce explained. “And you found the chamber with the eight-pointed star in the Prison, too.” Nesta lifted her head. “So?” “So I want you to take the Starsword.” Bryce held the blade between them. “Gwydion—whatever you call it here. The age of the Starborn is over on Midgard. It ends with me.” “I don’t understand.” But Bryce began backing toward the portal, taking Hunt’s hand, and smiled again at the female, at her mate, at their world, as the Northern Rift began to close. “I think that the eight-pointed star was tattooed on you for a reason. Take that sword and go figure out why.
Sarah J. Maas (House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3))
Buddha is the only prophet who said, "I do not care to know your various theories about God. What is the use of discussing all the subtle doctrines about the soul? Do good and be good. And this will take you to freedom and to whatever truth there is." He was, in the conduct of his life, absolutely without personal motives; and what man worked more than he? Show me in history one character who has soared so high above all. The whole human race has produced but one such character, such high philosophy, such wide sympathy. This great philosopher, preaching the highest philosophy, yet had the deepest sympathy for the lowest of animals, and never put forth any claims for himself. He is the ideal Karma-Yogi, acting entirely without motive, and the history of humanity shows him to have been the greatest man ever born; beyond compare the greatest combination of heart and brain that ever existed, the greatest soul-power that has even been manifested. He is the first great reformer the world has seen. He was the first who dared to say, "Believe not because some old manuscripts are produced, believe not because it is your national belief, because you have been made to believe it from your childhood; but reason it all out, and after you have analysed it, then, if you find that it will do good to one and all, believe it, live up to it, and help others to live up to it." He works best who works without any motive, neither for money, nor for fame, nor for anything else; and when a man can do that, he will be a Buddha, and out of him will come the power to work in such a manner as will transform the world. This man represents the very highest ideal of Karma-Yoga.
Vivekananda (Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda)
This novel humbled me in a number of ways. I was reading manuscripts for a magazine called Accent, and had in front of my prose-bleary eyes a piece called “A Horse in a London Flat.” And I was in a doze. More dreariness. More pretension. When will it all end? How shall I phrase my polite rejection? Something, I don’t remember what it was now, but something ten pages along woke me up, as if I had nearly fallen asleep and toppled from my chair. Perhaps it was the startle of an image or the rasp of a line. I went back to the beginning, and soon realized that I had let my eyes slide over paragraphs of astonishing prose without responding to them or recognizing their quality. That was my first humiliation. I then carried the manuscript to my fellow editors, as if I were bringing the original “good news,” only to learn that they were perfectly familiar with the work of John Hawkes and admired it extravagantly. Hadn’t I read The Cannibal, or The Goose on the Grave? Where had I been! What a dummy! (Though my humiliation would have been worse if I had written that rejection.) A number of years had to erode my embarrassment before I could confess that I had not spotted him at once (as I initially pretended). What a dummy indeed. The Lime Twig is a beautiful and brutal book, and when it comes to the engravement of the sentence, no one now writing can match him.
William H. Gass (A Temple of Texts)
Certainty is an unrealistic and unattainable ideal. We need to have pastors who are schooled in apologetics and engaged intellectually with our culture so as to shepherd their flock amidst the wolves. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. They know little of the riches of deep understanding of Christian truth, of the confidence inspired by the discovery that one’s faith is logical and fits the facts of experience, and of the stability brought to one’s life by the conviction that one’s faith is objectively true. God could not possibly have intended that reason should be the faculty to lead us to faith, for faith cannot hang indefinitely in suspense while reason cautiously weighs and reweighs arguments. The Scriptures teach, on the contrary, that the way to God is by means of the heart, not by means of the intellect. When a person refuses to come to Christ, it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. unbelief is at root a spiritual, not an intellectual, problem. Sometimes an unbeliever will throw up an intellectual smoke screen so that he can avoid personal, existential involvement with the gospel. In such a case, further argumentation may be futile and counterproductive, and we need to be sensitive to moments when apologetics is and is not appropriate. A person who knows that Christianity is true on the basis of the witness of the Spirit may also have a sound apologetic which reinforces or confirms for him the Spirit’s witness, but it does not serve as the basis of his belief. As long as reason is a minister of the Christian faith, Christians should employ it. It should not surprise us if most people find our apologetic unconvincing. But that does not mean that our apologetic is ineffective; it may only mean that many people are closed-minded. Without a divine lawgiver, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say that you are right and I am wrong. No atheist or agnostic really lives consistently with his worldview. In some way he affirms meaning, value, or purpose without an adequate basis. It is our job to discover those areas and lovingly show him where those beliefs are groundless. We are witnesses to a mighty struggle for the mind and soul of America in our day, and Christians cannot be indifferent to it. If moral values are gradually discovered, not invented, then our gradual and fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objective reality of that realm than our gradual, fallible apprehension of the physical world undermines the objectivity of that realm. God has given evidence sufficiently clear for those with an open heart, but sufficiently vague so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed. Because of the need for instruction and personal devotion, these writings must have been copied many times, which increases the chances of preserving the original text. In fact, no other ancient work is available in so many copies and languages, and yet all these various versions agree in content. The text has also remained unmarred by heretical additions. The abundance of manuscripts over a wide geographical distribution demonstrates that the text has been transmitted with only trifling discrepancies.
William Lane Craig (Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics)
At that time there were a good number of noble houses in Segovia which were no better off than we were; drawn together by this common interest, they had introduced a method of saving money. They rarely visited each other; ladies showed themselves at their windows, and gentlemen remained in the street below. There was a great deal of playing of the guitar, and even more amorous sighing, neither of which cost a penny. Manufacturers of vicuna cloth lived in luxury; we could not emulate them, so we took our revenge by despising and ridiculing them.
Jan Potocki (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa)
A visitor from Timbuctu about 450 years ago wrote as follows: 'In Timbuctu there are numerous judges, doctors and clerics all receiving good salaries from the king. He pays great respect to men of learning. There is a great demand for books in manuscript, imported from Barbary. More profit is made from the book trade than from any other line of business.' In a city which was renowned for its trade in gold, there was more profit to be made from books than from any other line of business! In other words, learning was valued more highly than gold!
Walter Rodney (The Groundings with My Brothers)
One of Marx’s greatest insights, delivered in an early book known as the Manuscripts of 1844, is that work can be one of the sources of our greatest joys. It is because Marx had such high hopes for work that he was so angry at the miserable work that most of humanity is forced to endure. In order to be fulfilled at work, Marx wrote that workers need ‘to see themselves in the objects they have created’. At its best, labour offers us a chance to externalise what’s good inside us (let’s say, our creativity, our rigour, our logic), and to give it a stable, enduring form in some sort of object or service independent of us.
The School of Life (Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today (The School of Life Library))
The Bengali poet Ganga Ram in his Maharashta Purana gave a fuller picture of the terror they inspired. ‘The people on earth were filled with sin,’ he wrote, ‘and there was no worship of Rama and Krishna. Day and night people took their pleasure with the wives of others.’ Finally, he wrote, Shiva ordered Nandi to enter the body of the Maratha king Shahu. ‘Let him send his agents, that sinners and evil doers be punished.’29 Soon after: The Bargis [Marathas] began to plunder the villages and all the people fled in terror. Brahmin pandits fled, taking with them loads of manuscripts; goldsmiths fled with the scales and weights; and fishermen with their nets and lines – all fled. The people fled in all directions; who could count their numbers? All who lived in villages fled when they heard the name of the Bargis. Ladies of good family, who had never before set a foot on a road fled from the Bargis with baskets on their heads. And land owning Rajputs, who had gained their wealth with the sword, threw down their swords and fled. And sadhus and monks fled, riding on litters, their bearers carrying their baggage on their shoulders; and many farmers fled, their seed for next year’s crops on the backs of their bullocks, and ploughs on their shoulders. And pregnant women, all but unable to walk, began their labour on the road and were delivered there. There were some people who stood in the road and asked of all who passed where the Bargis were. Everyone replied – I have not seen them with my own eyes. But seeing everyone flees, I flee also. Then suddenly the Bargis swept down with a great shout and surrounded the people in their fields. They snatched away gold and silver, rejecting everything else. Of some people they cut off the hand, of some the nose and ears; some they killed outright. They dragged away the most beautiful women, who tried to flee, and tied ropes to their fingers and necks. When one had finished with a woman, another took her, while the raped women screamed for help. The Bargis after committing all foul, sinful and bestial acts, let these women go.
William Dalrymple (The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company)
Martha Gellhorn joined Hemingway in Madrid one month later. After six weeks in Spain, Ernest left, picked up the manuscript of his novel in Paris, and went to Bimini to revise it. There he was reunited with his children and Pauline. A few weeks later he came to New York again to deliver a speech before the Second American Writers’ Congress at Carnegie Hall. Martha sat by his side during the speeches that preceded his. Her influence perhaps explained a new political tone that his speech displayed. “Really good writers are always rewarded under almost any existing system of government that they can tolerate,” he said before the writers’ congress. “There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism.” While
A. Scott Berg (Max Perkins: Editor of Genius)
This unfinished play follows Myrrhina, an Alexandrian noblewoman, who travels to the mountains to tempt Honorius, a Christian hermit, away from goodness with her beauty and wealth. After they talk, he decides to return to sin in Alexandria, while she discovers religion and chooses to remain in the desert. Wilde had begun work on the play in 1894, between writing Salomé and The Importance of Being Earnest, but he was unable to complete it before his trial and imprisonment. He considered revisiting the play in 1897 after his release from prison, but he then lacked motivation for literary work, although during his imprisonment, it was much on his mind and he had described it in a letter to a friend as one among his “beautiful coloured, musical things”. Before his imprisonment, the fragments had been entrusted to Mrs. Leverson, who in 1897 went to Paris on purpose to restore the manuscript to the author. However, Wilde accidently left the papers in a taxi cab and now only a portion of a first draft survives.
Oscar Wilde (Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated))
I dial her mum's number, then sit down cross-legged, facing the wall. When she comes on the line, she sounds uncertain, hesitant. 'Hey! Guess where I am?' I ask, my voice loud with false cheer. 'Rami told me. The Wellesly Hospital in Worthing. What's it like?' 'For a loony-bin it's actually quite decent,' I reply. 'I don't have Sky or an en-suite, and the menu isn't exactly à la carte, but you know...' I tail off. There is a silence. 'Do you have your own room?' Jenna asks, 'Oh yeah, yeah. I have a lovely view of the sea between the bars of my window.' She doesn't laugh. 'Have you started' -there is a pause as she searches for the right word -'threatment?' 'Yeah, yeah. We had group therapy today. Tomorrow we'll probably have art therapy - maybe I'll draw you a hourse and a garden. I know, perhaps they'll teach us to make baskets! Isn't that why they call us basket cases?' 'Flynn, stop,' Jennah softly implores. 'And we'll probably have music therapy the day after. Maybe I'll get to play the tambourine. Or the triangle. I've always wanted to play the triangle!' 'Flynn-' 'No, I'm serious! I'll ask for some manuscript paper and see if I can write a composition for tambourine and triangle. Then I can post if off to you to hand in for my next composition assignment.' 'Flynn, listen-' 'Hold on, hold on! I'm making a note to myself now: Find fellow insane musician and start composing the Flynn Laukonen Sonata for Tambourine and Triangle.' 'Flynn-' 'And then, when they let me out, if they ever let me out, perhaps you could pull a few strigns and organize for me and my tambourine buddy to give a recital. I'm not sure where though -how about the subway at Marble Arch tube? Nice and central, good acoustics-' 'What are the other people like?' Jennah cuts in, an edge to her voice. I notice she doesn't use the word patients. Clever Jennah. For a moment there you almost made me forget I was locked up in a mental institution. 'Round the bend, just like me,' I reply. 'I'm in excellent company. We'll be swapping suicide tips in no time at all!' I give a harsh laugh.
Tabitha Suzuma (A Voice in the Distance (Flynn Laukonen, #2))
In America the magazines in which one can frequently publish stories or poems about Negroes are very few, and most of these do not pay, since they are of a social service or proletarian nature. The big American bourgeois publications are very careful about what they publish by or about colored people. Exotic or humorous tales they will occasionally use. Stories that show Negroes as savages, fools, or clowns, they will often print. And once in a blue moon there may be a really sound and serious literary picture of black life in a big magazine--but it doesn't happen often enough to feed an author. They can't live on blue moons. Most colored writers find their work turned down with a note that the files are already full of "Negro material," or that the subject is not suitable, or, as happened to me recently when I submitted a story about a more or less common situation in American interracial life--the manuscript was returned with regrets since the story was "excellently written, but it would shock our good middle-class audience to death." And thus our American publications shy away from the Negro problem and the work of Negro writers.
Langston Hughes (Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings)
Who is America named after? Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant. Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot—the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorized by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the west. On his little ship Matthew, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, predating Vespucci by two years. Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: “…on Saint John the Baptist’s day [June 24], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew,” which clearly suggests this is what happened. Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term America to refer to the new continent. The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemüller’s great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseemüller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502. This suggests he didn’t know for sure and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name “America” was known and used was Bristol—not somewhere the France-based Waldseemüller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced “America” with “Terra Incognita” in his world map of 1513. Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the name of America for his discovery. There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diemen’s Land, or the Cook Islands). America would have become Vespucci Land (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it.
John Lloyd (The Book of General Ignorance)
It was an amazing experience,” I said. “By remembering the love I felt I was able to open up. I sat up there all day simmering in it. I didn’t reach the state I experienced on the ridge but I got close.” Sanchez looked more serious. “The role of love has been misunderstood for a long time. Love is not something we should do to be good or to make the world a better place out of some abstract moral responsibility, or because we should give up our hedonism. Connecting with energy feels like excitement, then euphoria, and then love. Finding enough energy to maintain that state of love certainly helps the world, but it most directly helps us. It is the most hedonistic thing we can do.” I agreed, then noticed he had moved his chair back several more feet and was looking at me intensely, his eyes unfocused. “So what does my field look like,” I asked. “It is much larger,” he said. “I think you feel very good.” “I do.” “Good. That is what we do here.” “Tell me about that,” I said. “We train priests to go farther into the mountains and work with the Indians. It is a lonely job and the priests must have great strength. All of the men here have been screened thoroughly and all have one thing in common: each has had one experience he calls mystical. “I have been studying this kind of experience for many years,” he continued, “even before the Manuscript was found, and I believe that when one has already encountered a mystical experience, getting back into this state and raising one’s personal energy level comes much easier. Others can also connect but it takes longer. A strong memory of the experience, as I think you learned, facilitates its re-creation. After that, one slowly builds back.” “What does a person’s energy field look like when this is happening?” “It grows outward and changes color slightly.” “What color?” “Normally from a dull white toward green and blue. But the most important thing is that it expands. For instance, during your mystical encounter on the ridge top, your energy flashed outward into the whole universe. Essentially you connected and drew energy from the entire cosmos and in turn your energy swelled to encompass everything, everywhere. Can you remember how that felt?” “Yeah,” I said. “I felt as though the entire universe was my body and I was just the head, or perhaps more accurately, the eyes.” “Yes,” he said, “and at that moment, your energy field and that of the universe were the same. The universe was your body.
James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy (Celestine Prophecy, #1))
After my return from Carolina in 1746, I made some observations on keeping slaves, which some time before his decease I showed to him; he perused the manuscript, proposed a few alterations, and appeared well satisfied that I found a concern on that account. In his last sickness, as I was watching with him one night, he being so far spent that there was no expectation of his recovery, though he had the perfect use of his understanding, he asked me concerning the manuscript, and whether I expected soon to proceed to take the advice of friends in publishing it? After some further conversation thereon, he said, "I have all along been deeply affected with the oppression of the poor negroes; and now, at last, my concern for them is as great as ever." By his direction I had written his will in a time of health, and that night he desired me to read it to him, which I did; and he said it was agreeable to his mind. He then made mention of his end, which he believed was near; and signified that though he was sensible of many imperfections in the course of his life, yet his experience of the power of truth, and of the love and goodness of God from time to time, even till now, was such that he had no doubt that on leaving this life he should enter into one more happy.
Benjamin Franklin (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
Carolina removed an old and creased single sheet of paper, yellowed with age, that was now carefully protected in clear, acid-free paper. She handed it to Dara. "This was folded up in a parik-til, in the box with my birth certificate." "A parik-til?" asked Jennifer. "It is a small pouch that is filled with things to bring good luck or blessings." She held up the cloth bag and opened it for the girls to see. "Gypsies use them, but so do Native Americans as well as people from Central and South America and other parts of the world. When I got it, I had no idea what it was or what it meant. I knew the folded piece of paper was old and somehow had to be important to me since my birth parents had included it with the other things they wanted me to have." Carolina stood up and walked over to the window. How well she remembered the overwhelming emotions she felt when she first saw those pages of the Voynich Manuscript in the book she was reading, and then realizing that the ancient script was the same as what was on the piece of paper that had been preserved in the parik-til--her parik-til. "Anyway, as soon as I saw the photographs of some of the manuscript pages in the book I was reading, I made the connection immediately. It was the same script as what was on this sheet of paper that I had been given." All three FIGS crowded closely together to look at Carolina's treasure.
Barbara Casey (The Cadence of Gypsies (The F.I.G. Mysteries, Book 1))
Describe the defeated ones,” said a merchant, when he saw that the Copt had finished speaking. And he answered: The defeated are those who never fail. Defeat means that we lose a particular battle or war. Failure does not allow us to go on fighting. Defeat comes when we fail to get something we very much want. Failure does not allow us to dream. Its motto is: “Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.” Defeat ends when we launch into another battle. Failure has no end; it is a lifetime choice. Defeat is for those who, despite their fears, live with enthusiasm and faith. Defeat is for the valiant. Only they will know the honor of losing and the joy of winning. I am not here to tell you that defeat is part of life; we all know that. Only the defeated know Love. Because it is in the realm of Love that we fight our first battles—and generally lose. I am here to tell you that there are people who have never been defeated. They are the ones who never fought. They managed to avoid scars, humiliations, and feelings of helplessness, as well as those moments when even warriors doubt the existence of God. Such people can say with pride: “I never lost a battle.” On the other hand, they will never be able to say: “I won a battle.” Not that they care. They live in a universe in which they believe they are invulnerable; they close their eyes to injustices and to suffering; they feel safe because they do not have to deal with the daily challenges faced by those who risk stepping out beyond their own boundaries. They have never heard the words “good-bye” or “I’ve come back. Embrace me with the fervor of someone who, having lost me, has found me again.” Those who were never defeated seem happy and superior, masters of a truth they never had to lift a finger to achieve. They are always on the side of the strong. They’re like hyenas, who eat only the leavings of lions. They teach their children: “Don’t get involved in conflicts; you’ll only lose. Keep your doubts to yourself and you’ll never have any problems. If someone attacks you, don’t get offended or demean yourself by hitting back. There are more important things in life.” In the silence of the night, they fight their imaginary battles: their unrealized dreams, the injustices to which they turned a blind eye, the moments of cowardice they managed to conceal from other people—but not from themselves—and the love that crossed their path with a sparkle in its eyes, the love God had intended for them, but which they lacked the courage to embrace. And they promise themselves: “Tomorrow will be different.” But tomorrow comes and the paralyzing question surfaces in their mind: “What if it doesn’t work out?” And so they do nothing. Woe to those who were never beaten! They will never be winners in this life.
Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
Many people perceive the merit of a manuscript which is read to them, but will not declare themselves in its favour until they see what success it has in the world when printed, or what intelligent men will say about it. They do not like to risk their opinion, and they want to be carried away by the crowd, and dragged along by the multitude. Then they say that they were amongst the first who approved of that work, and the general public shares their opinion. 32 Such men lose the best opportunities of convincing us that they are intelligent, clever, and first-rate critics, and can really discover what is good and what is better. A fine work falls into their hands; it is an author’s first book, before he has got any great name; there is nothing to prepossess any one in his favour, and by applauding his writings one does not court or flatter the great. Zelotes, you are not required to cry out: “This is a masterpiece; human intelligence never went farther; the human speech cannot soar higher; henceforward we will judge of no one’s taste but by what he thinks of this book.” Such exaggerated and offensive expressions are only employed by postulants for pensions or benefices, and are even injurious to what is really commendable and what one wishes to praise. Why not merely say—“That’s a good book?” It is true you say it when the whole of France has approved of it, and foreigners as well as your own countrymen, when it is printed all over Europe, and has been translated into several languages, but then it is too late.
Jean de La Bruyère
We cannot provide a definition of those products from which the age takes it name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. The cleverer writers poked fun at their own work. Many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. It is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out. Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. Thousands upon thousands spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phaeacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.
Hermann Hesse
It's a stupendous day for Dr. Seuss fans, with the announcement of a new, previously unpublished picture book, What Pet Should I Get? , to be released on July 28th.  When Dr. Seuss (aka Ted Geisel) passed away in 1991 he left behind pages of text and sketches for book ideas and projects he had worked on over the years but hadn't completed before his death. Where were these hidden gems, you might ask?  Locked away in a safe? Buried in the backyard? Hidden behind a secret wall in his hat closet?  No.  Like many utterly ordinary people, Seuss had a box in his office filled with a paper trail of ideas and bursts of creativity--only in this case, it was a veryspecial box of creative bits and pieces... Who knew, when his wife, Audrey Geisel, packed away that box shortly after Seuss' death, that when she opened it up over two decades later, she would discover the complete manuscript and illustrations for What Pet Should I Get? . I'm envisioning a ray of bright green and blue and red sunshine beaming down on that moment...  In point of fact, the brilliant colors of Seuss' stories came later in the evolution of his books, so color is being added to the black and white sketches of What Pet Should I Get? by Seuss' former art director, Cathy Goldsmith, who worked with him on the last book he published before his death, Oh, The Places You'll Go!   I can't even imagine the goosebumps Goldsmith must have felt to see and hold never-before-seen Seuss artwork... So while we have to wait until the sun is beating down and summer vacation is nearing an end before we can get our hands on a brand new Dr. Seuss story, can also look forward to hearing about what else was found in that treasure trove of Seussy goodness--two more stories are promised as a result of the findings.
Anonymous
When we finished we sat quietly and watched the endless view. I was slowly realizing that this was one of the Seer’s qualities that I appreciated the most. To be present without words, without expectations and without any judgement. These were the times when I felt that he could communicate his thoughts and visions through his presence alone. Looking out became looking in. It was an undramatic kind of transmission, which would move you almost imperceptibly and silently. At these moments I felt my body relax completely. Each fibre, each muscle and every single cell found its correct place. An empathetic vigilance grew from this relaxed condition, a vigilance, which saw people and things as they were on their own merit. This was not about acceptance any more, since there was nothing to accept. Everything was as it was. It was a long-forgotten language. He showed me how almost all communication between people, the spoken and the written word, is nothing but our desperate attempts to cling to illusory personalities and identities tainted by prejudices, fear and vanity. A language which did not allow any room for listening, which focused on itself, which was excluding and only lived due to its attack and defence system was, according to him, a poor and inhumane one. Although the users of this language were usually very good at repartee and were able to write infinitely, they were really only good at maintaining and communicating limitations without end. It was this maintenance of limitations which was one of the main reasons that the great paradigm change, which all were waiting for, did not happen. He did not judge. He simply looked at and worked for the release of limitations wherever he met them. Not until the dissolution of all mental noise would it be possible to practise the transmission of stillness as a transforming kind of communication between people. It was not possible to enter this condition with a limited attention. The road to the transpersonal and the related level might seem difficult, because it demanded an obligation which included the complete human being. It was not enough to be just a little bit pregnant. You either were or you were not. And the paradoxical difference between the one and the other was the simple fact that the sleeping person decided to open his eyes, to wake up and become conscious of his wakeful condition. The fact that such a seemingly simple decision could appear so difficult lay in the fact that it entailed the release of more or less everything that you have ever learned and gained, and which you erroneously have interpreted as a true realization. He presented all these considerations to me on the mountain. In one single thought, without words, without judgement.
Lars Muhl (The O Manuscript: The Scandinavian Bestseller)
As the years go by and I grow older, I feel compelled to record my experiences in wartime Germany. It is important that my children, grandchildren and future generations know about the difficult times we all endured and of the horrors that existed in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Due to my advanced age and present condition, I am aware of the urgency to document my memories. If I fail in this, I will fail those who follow me, for they will never know!” Adeline Perry This book had its origin many years ago when Adeline Perry tried to recount her experiences and found that she would become overcome by her emotions every time she tried. The horrors and trials that she had experienced, plus the responsibility of raising her two daughters proved to be overwhelming. It was not until the twilight of her life when her daughters gently persuaded her to try again so that future generations might hear and perhaps learn from her experiences. In fact a good portion of these manuscripts were written while she was in the care of Hospice and only now survive because of immense personal strength and devotion to her family and the desire that what had happened to her would never happen again. Her daughter, and my wife, Ursula can take a great deal of pride in the effort it took to make these manuscripts a reality. After Adeline’s passing I had the privilege to develop the book Suppressed I Rise. Staying true to her story I gave her the authorship of the first edition of this book, which adhered to, and did not exceed what she had left in her original manuscripts. This book which was printed in limited numbers became an instant success and deserved more exposure. Readers also felt that there were questions that went unanswered requiring a follow-up. How did Adeline justify going to Germany prior to World War II? What happened to her marriage to Richard and how did she resume her own life, as a single mother, when she returned to South Africa! With additional reflections by her daughters Brigitte Grigsby and Ursula Bracker, and travel to the areas discussed in Suppressed I Rise, I expanded the book to include the prewar years. I also corrected minor contradictions and factual discrepancies that were inadvertently caused by the passage of time. Talking to people in Germany I confirmed some of what had happened including the hanging of the Russian prisoner of war. The book has now become a powerful example of not only personal courage but also of human tragedy. It is a book that I am proud to have written and share in the concept that it was a story that had to be told.
Hank Bracker
(KJV) King James Translation Important Facts An advantage of owning or reading a (KJV) King James Translation or Authorized Version, whether they are the older 1611 version or newer non-1611 version is that they are usually more accurate compared to many other bibles. They rank highly when translated from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek manuscripts. However all bible translations have many faults with the translation as does the King James Version which is not perfect by any means It’s a difficult task to master translation of hundreds of scrolls and manuscripts and compile them into a single book. With that being said, when choosing a bible you will usually have to choose between the lesser of the two evils, and it is always advised to have at least three translations if not more when you want to get a more accurate idea of what the writer is saying. One major disadvantage that the King James Bible (KJV) has is that the translators have replaced the holy names of The Almighty Creator and His Son, as many other translators have also done with other bible translations. This is never a good thing to do. To replace a proper noun or name, especially when it happens to be the name of our Heavenly Father or His Son our Messiah is a serious thing to consider changing. The bible clearly states in many verses to make His name “known” and proclaim it. It does not say to “change it” or to proclaim a different name. Our Opinion about Name Changes The reasons of why the translators chose to make these name changes is “not” something that we at Heavenly Publishers want to focus on. Instead, we prefer to educate readers of this fact, especially those that were not already aware of it and make suggestions as to how to fix this. Many translations around these days have this same issue and even other serious changes on top of this one. We would also like to encourage all readers to consider restoring the holy names of our Savior and Heavenly Father back into the bible and back into our reading and vocabulary. The example of how our Savior taught us to pray by starting out in prayer by acknowledging and revering the holy name of “Our Father” is something we should remember. The prayer starts out with the words, Our Father who art in Heaven, “Hallowed be Thy Name” and is a great example of how important and holy His name is. This word “hallow” means to render sacred and consider holy. So my question to you is can you imagine doing something like changing our Father’s holy name to something else? Never should this be done, but the translators of many bible versions have done this. The KJV is only one example of this spiritually criminal act. The people that have done this for whatever agendas they had will be held accountable and judged accordingly one day by their maker as He sees fit. It’s not our job to judge but to make others aware of this and hopefully reverse this wrongdoing.
Heavenly Father (King James Bible for Kindle: KJV with All Word Search)
It had become too powerful, its abbots competed with kings: in Abo did I not perhaps have the example of a monarch who, with monarch’s demeanor, tried to settle controversies between monarchs? The very knowledge that the abbeys had accumulated was now used as barter goods, cause for pride, motive for boasting and prestige; just as knights displayed armor and standards, our abbots displayed illuminated manuscripts. . . . And all the more so now (what madness!), when our monasteries had also lost the leadership in learning: cathedral schools, urban corporations, universities were copying books, perhaps more and better than we, and producing new ones, and this may have been the cause of many misfortunes.
Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)
You must make everything that is yours saleable, i.e., useful. If I ask the political economist: Do I obey economic laws if I extract money by offering my body for sale, by surrendering it to another's lust? (The factory workers in France call the prostitution of their wives and daughters the nth working hour, which is literally correct.) — Or am I not acting in keeping with political economy if I sell my friend to the Moroccans? (And the direct sale of men in the form of a trade in conscripts, etc., takes place in all civilized countries.) — Then the political economist replies to me: You do not transgress my laws; but see what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say about it. My political economic ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with, but — But whom am I now to believe, political economy or ethics? — The ethics of political economy is acquisition, work, thrift, sobriety — but political economy promises to satisfy my needs. — The political economy of ethics is the opulence of a good conscience, of virtue, etc.; but how can I live virtuously if I do not live? And how can I have a good conscience if I do not know anything? It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies to me a different and opposite yardstick — ethics one and political economy another; for each is a specific estrangement of man and focuses attention on a particular field of estranged essential activity, and each stands in an estranged relation to the other.
Karl Marx (Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)
p2 I'd seen a photo of the actual red and white checked notebook that was Anne [Frank]'s first diary. I longed to own a similar notebook. Stationery was pretty dire back in the late fifties and early sixties. There was no such thing as Paperchase. I walked round and round the stationery counter in Woolworths and spent most of my pocket money on notebooks, but they weren't strong on variety. You could have shiny red sixpenny notebooks, lined inside, with strange maths details about rods and poles and perches on the back. (I never found out what they were!) Then you could have shiny blue sixpenny notebooks. That was your lot. I was enchanted to read in Dodie Smith's novel I Capture The Castle that the heroine, Cassandra, was writing her diary in a similar sixpenny notebook. She eventually progressed to a shilling notebook. My Woolworths rarely stocked such expensive luxuries. Then, two thirds of the way through the book, Cassandra is given a two-guinea red leather manuscript book. I lusted after that fictional notebook for years. I told my mother, Biddy. She rolled her eyes. It could have cost two hundred guineas - both were way out of our league... My dad, Harry, was a civil servant. One of the few perks of his job was that he had an unlimited illegal supply of notepads watermarked SO - Stationery Office. I'd drawn on these pads for years, I'd scribbled stories, I'd written letters. They were serviceable but unexciting: thin cream paper unreliably bound with glue at the top. You couldn't write a journal with these notepads; it would fall apart in days... My spelling wasn't too hot. It still isn't. Thank goodness for the spellcheck on my computer!
Jacqueline Wilson (My Secret Diary)
library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come.
Susan Orlean (The Library Book)
It is curious to note how slowly the mechanism of the intellectual life improves. Contrast the ordinary library facilities of a middle-class English home, such as the present writer is now working in, with the inconveniences and deficiencies of the equipment of an Alexandrian writer, and one realizes the enormous waste of time, physical exertion, and attention that went on through all the centuries during which that library flourished. Before the present writer lie half a dozen books, and there are good indices to three of them. He can pick up any one of these six books, refer quickly to a statement, verify a quotation, and go on writing. Contrast with that the tedious unfolding of a rolled manuscript. Close at hand are two encyclopedias, a dictionary, an atlas of the world, a biographical dictionary, and other books of reference. They have no marginal indices, it is true; but that perhaps is asking for too much at present. There were no such resources in the world in 300 B.C. Alexandria had still to produce the first grammar and the first dictionary. This present book is being written in manuscript; it is then taken by a typist and typewritten very accurately. It can then, with the utmost convenience, be read over, corrected amply, rearranged freely, retyped, and recorrected. Fig 00346
H.G. Wells (The Outline of History (illustrated & annotated))
His book For Whom the Bell Tolls was an instant success in the summer of 1940, and afforded him the means to live in style at his villa outside of Havana with his new wife Mary Welsh, whom he married in 1946. It was during this period that he started getting headaches and gaining weight, frequently becoming depressed. Being able to shake off his problems, he wrote a series of books on the Land, Air and Sea, and later wrote The Old Man and the Sea for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1954. Hemingway on a trip to Africa where he barely survived two successive airplane crashes. Returning to Cuba, Ernest worked reshaping the recovered work and wrote his memoir, A Moveable Feast. He also finished True at First Light and The Garden of Eden. Being security conscious, he stored his works in a safe deposit box at a bank in Havana. His home Finca Vigía had become a hub for friends and even visiting tourists. It was reliably disclosed to me that he frequently enjoyed swinger’s parties and orgies at his Cuban home. In Spain after divorcing Frank Sinatra Hemingway introduced Ava Gardner to many of the bullfighters he knew and in a free for all, she seduced many of hotter ones. After Ava Gardner’s affair with the famous Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín crashed, she came to Cuba and stayed at Finca Vigía, where she had what was termed to be a poignant relationship with Ernest. Ava Gardner swam nude in the pool, located down the slope from the Hemingway house, after which he told his staff that the water was not to be emptied. An intimate friendship grew between Hemingway’s forth and second wife, Mary and Pauline. Pauline often came to Finca Vigia, in the early 1950s, and likewise Mary made the crossing of the Florida Straits, back to Key West several times. The ex-wife and the current wife enjoyed gossiping about their prior husbands and lovers and had choice words regarding Ernest. In 1959, Hemingway was in Cuba during the revolution, and was delighted that Batista, who owned the nearby property, that later became the location of the dismal Pan Americana Housing Development, was overthrown. He shared the love of fishing with Fidel Castro and remained on good terms with him. Reading the tea leaves, he decided to leave Cuba after hearing that Fidel wanted to nationalize the properties owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. In the summer of 1960, while working on a manuscript for Life magazine, Hemingway developed dementia becoming disorganized and confused. His eyesight had been failing and he became despondent and depressed. On July 25, 1960, he and his wife Mary left Cuba for the last time. He never retrieved his books or the manuscripts that he left in the bank vault. Following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban government took ownership of his home and the works he left behind, including an estimated 5,000 books from his personal library. After years of neglect, his home, which was designed by the Spanish architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer in 1886, has now been largely restored as the Hemingway Museum. The museum, overlooking San Francisco de Paula, as well as the Straits of Florida in the distance, houses much of his work as well as his boat housed near his pool.
Hank Bracker
This “miraculous man”—Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg—was nearing sixty years of age. He had been born in Mainz, a town on the banks of the Rhine River with a population of six thousand, sometime in the mid- to late 1390s. Little is known about his early life, or, for that matter, about his middle or later years either. He moved 110 miles upstream along the Rhine to Strasbourg sometime around the late 1420s, probably as an exile following municipal disorders in Mainz that pitted the middle-class guildsmen against the upper class, to which Gutenberg’s family belonged. A good deal of what is known about him comes from his various legal scrapes. In the first of these, in 1437, he was sued for a breach of his promise to marry a woman named Ennelin zu der Yserin Tür (Ennelin of the Iron Gate); he was also sued for defamation by one of her witnesses, a shoemaker whom Gutenberg called “a miserable wretch who lived by lying and cheating.” Gutenberg was forced to pay the shoemaker compensation for the slander but appears to have avoided marriage to Ennelin.4 By this time he was a member of Strasbourg’s guild of goldsmiths, supporting himself by polishing gemstones and, together with a partner named Hans Riffe, manufacturing pilgrims’ mirrors in anticipation of the crowds coming to view the famous and sacred relics exposed every seven years at Aachen, such as the swaddling clothes of Jesus and the robe of the Virgin. These mirrors were used by pilgrims according to the religious practice of the day, capturing and “retaining” the divine reflection of these holy relics, after which they were proudly worn on the return journey as badges. The “miraculous man,” Johannes Gutenberg.
Ross King (The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance)
Many people do not understand the art of winning and this has been the case for many centuries. There was once a Shaolin monk who was constantly being challenged to fight. He always won, even against the angriest and strongest fighters, because they could not understand that technique is always superior to personal will and expectations. Some of the men noticed his skill and asked to be trained with him, and once their technique was good enough, they would try to defeat him. But the monk would defeat them instead because they could not understand that experience is always superior to technique. As the monk grew older, he did not desire to fight anymore, and so many men would insult him. But the monk was still winning,  because they could not understand that they were wasting an opportunity to learn and the monk did not desire to waste the little time he had left on earth. Before he died, the monk wrote a few manuscripts with his wisdom, but few were capable of understanding his words because their spirit was not ready. They were still thinking about winning. And so they lost everything, they lost the opportunity to develop a new technique, gain experience, study and understand how to win.
Dan Desmarques
By chance – but it is not by chance – I open the preface to the Veda of my friend and master and ask whoever will listen to me: What would you save from a house in flames? A precious, irreplaceable manuscript containing a message of salvation for the human race or a small number of people threatened by that fire? The dilemma is real and not only for the writer: how can one only be an ‘intellectual, interested in the truth, or only a ‘spiritual person’ engaged in goodness, when people desperately beg for food and justice? How can one follow a contemplative, philosophical or even religious path when the world requires action, commitment and politics? Vice versa, how can one act to make a better world or an indispensable revolution when what one needs is a serene intuition and a just evaluation? It should be clear to all who share life on our planet that the house in flames is not a fact that involves only one individual. Why was I created? Why, having been saved, do I still exist? How must I live and what can I do? My reader said: If I am not ready to save the manuscript from the fire, if I don’t take my intellectual vocation seriously, placing it before everything else – even at the risk of appearing inhuman –, then I am also incapable of helping people in a more serious and immediate manner. Vice versa, if I am not attentive and ready to save people from a outbreak of fire, which means, if I don’t consider my spiritual calling with total honesty, sacrificing all the rest for it, even my own life, then I will be incapable of saving the manuscript. If I let myself be involved in the solid problems of my times and if I don’t open my home to all of the winds of the world, then whatever I produce from an ivory tower will be sterile and cursed. Also, if I don’t close the doors and windows in order to concentrate on this work, I will not be able to offer anything of value to my neighbour. I hear each book on my shelves shouting in silence: In truth, the manuscript can come out of the flames charred and people burned, but the intensity of one preoccupation has helped me with the other. The dilemma is not to choose the monastery or the disco, Harvard or Chanakyapuri (the Vatican or the Quirinal), tradition or progress, politics or academia, the Church or the State, justice or truth. In a word, reality is not a matter of ‘either...or’, it is not a matter of choosing between spirit and matter, contemplation and action, written message and living persons, East and West, theory and approach or even between divine and human.1 My sense and destiny are inscribed in these words. I am a library, thus I exist in the world and thanks to men who have written, printed, bought and guarded my texts, I exist for them and in their world. I exist also because a man has existed. 1
Maciej Bielawski (The Song of a Library (Calligrammi))
What a good editor brings to a piece of writing is an objective eye that the writer has long since lost, and there is no end of ways in which an editor can improve a manuscript: pruning, shaping, clarifying, tidying a hundred inconsistencies of tense and pronoun and location and tone, noticing all the sentences that could be read in two different ways, dividing awkward long sentences into short ones, putting the writer back on the main road if he has strayed down a side path, building bridges where the writer has lost the reader by not paying attention to his transitions, questioning matters of judgment and taste. An editor’s hand must also be invisible. Whatever he adds in his own words shouldn’t sound like his own words; they should sound like the writer’s words.
William Zinsser (On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction)
Many people do not understand the art of winning and this has been the case for many centuries. There was once a Shaolin monk who was constantly being challenged to fight. He always won, even against the angriest and strongest fighters, because they could not understand that technique is always superior to personal will and expectations. Some of the men noticed his skill and asked to be trained with him, and once their technique was good enough, they would try to defeat him. But the monk would defeat them instead because they could not understand that experience is always superior to technique. As the monk grew older, he did not desire to fight anymore, and so many men would insult him. But the monk was still winning, because they could not understand that they were wasting an opportunity to learn and the monk did not desire to waste the little time he had left on earth. Before he died, the monk wrote a few manuscripts with his wisdom, but few were capable of understanding his words because their spirit was not ready. They were still thinking about winning. And so they lost everything, they lost the opportunity to develop a new technique, gain experience, study and understand how to win.
Dan Desmarques
For hundreds of years, the transmission of knowledge had depended on carnivorous appetites and good animal husbandry. Large volumes with hundreds of pages required the skins of many animals. One goat was often needed for each page of parchment in a large liturgical book such as an antiphonary, while a Bible might take the skins of more than two hundred animals—an entire herd of goats or flock of sheep.
Ross King (The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance)
In fact, some research studies have proved that people with brain damage resulting in not being able to experience emotions fully have reduced capacity to make good decisions. Even
Avery Wright (Psychology of Human Behavior: 3 Manuscripts-Emotional Intelligence, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy : The Best Guide to Understand ... EQ, Nonviolent communication, NLP, and CBT)
Luther called his tractate An Admonition to Peace on the Twelve Articles of the Peasantry in The manuscript survives, and the editors of the Weimar edition note with some asperity that its punctuation conforms to no rules-perhaps an indication that Luther wrote in white-hot temper. The tone of the opening is surprisingly mild given Luther's penchant for fury when things did not go his way. He was obviously trying to be diplomatic. In their twelfth article the peasants expressed a desire to be instructed if their interpretations of scripture and fairness were incorrect. Luther was happy to give them the instruction they sought. The mildest of peasants could not have been pleased with his detailed response to their grievances. Luther began at the heart of the matter. Without doubt, he said, some among the peasants expressed their fine Christian sentiments only for "paint and show," since "it is not possible in such a great host that all should be true Christians and have good intentions."30 His abiding conviction that true Christians formed a tiny minority among those who professed faith would seemingly force him to conclude that even among his own disciples, most were damned. If true Christians were always an unknown few, no political order was possible that assumed all nominal Christians to be equal. The majority of professing Christians would always live by selfish principles, and any program with specific details that claimed to be Christian could be only be "color and shine," pretense and appearance.
Richard Marius (Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death)
The manuscript seemed to shout less now; it was less stridently flag-wavingly English. As Stella had reinstated the Spanish oranges, the Dutch salad gardens and the Jewish fried fish, the accent of the text had changed. Instead of a clipped BBC English, it now spoke with a hotchpotch voice. Stella felt it more authentic for that, though, and her confidence in it began to return. It might no longer have a lion's roar, but this was a story of a trading and a hospitable nation, turned outward, not inward.
Caroline Scott (Good Taste)
No writer ever knows enough words but he doesn’t have to try to use all that he does know. Tests would show that I had an enormous vocabulary and through the years it must have grown, but I never had a desire to display it in the way that John Updike or William Buckley or William Safire do to such lovely and often surprising effect. They use words with such spectacular results; I try, not always successfully, to follow the pattern of Ernest Hemingway who achieved a striking style with short familiar words. I want to avoid calling attention to mine, judging them to be most effective as ancillaries to a sentence with a strong syntax. My approach has been more like that of Somerset Maugham, who late in life confessed that when he first thought of becoming a writer he started a small notebook in which he jotted down words that seemed unusually beautiful or exotic, such as chalcedony, for as a novice he believed that good writing consisted of liberally sprinkling his text with such words. But years later, when he was a successful writer, he chanced to review his list and found that he had never used even one of his beautiful collection. Good writing, for most of us, consists of trying to use ordinary words to achieve extraordinary results. I struggle to find the right word and keep always at hand the largest dictionary my workspace can hold, and I do believe I consult it at least six or seven times each working day, for English is a language that can never be mastered.* [*Even though I have studied English for decades I am constantly surprised to find new definitions I have not known: ‘panoply’ meaning ‘a full set of armor’, ‘calendar’ meaning ‘a printed index to a jumbled group of related manuscripts or papers’. —Chapter IX “Intellectual Equipment”, page 306
James A. Michener (The World Is My Home: A Memoir)
Science Fiction. I have sold thirteen stories, two of which have not yet been published and none of which are any damn good. I have sold to Universe, Original, Future, Super, Analog, Amazing, If, and Galaxy. A fourteenth story was sold to Fantastic Universe, which proceeded to drop dead before they could publish it. Both John Campbell and Cele Goldsmith have asked me to write sequels to novelettes of mine they had bought (I haven’t written either, and won’t). In a desk drawer I have twenty-odd thousand words of a science fiction novel, which is good, but which I’m not going to finish because it isn’t worth my while. Avalon pays three hundred and fifty dollars for a book, and I wouldn’t support such piracy either by writing for them or buying their wares. John Campbell isn’t the hero, so it can’t be serialized in Analog. If finished, it would run a lot longer than forty-five thousand words, so that leaves out Ace. There’s no gratuitous sex, so that excludes Galaxy/Beacon (or would if they were still being published). It isn’t a silly satire about a world controlled by advertising agencies or insurance companies or the A&P, so it can’t be serialized in Galaxy Magazine. It’s in sensible English, so Amazing is out. It isn’t about the horrors of Atomic War, so no mainstream hardcover house would look twice at it. I’d like to write it anyway for my own amusement (you know, like a real writer-type), but unpublished manuscripts unfortunately have a low enjoyment quota, at least for me. So the hell with it.
Donald E. Westlake (The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany)
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DrunkFire
Elizabeth might revere Waldo Emerson as an oracle of truth, but Waldo held Elizabeth in high esteem too. Her 1830 translation of de Gérando’s Self-Education inspired him, and her manuscript translation of the French mystic Guillaume Oegger’s True Messiah had provided “good things” as well. At this formative time in his life, Waldo Emerson found in Elizabeth Peabody both a woman who knew the ins and outs of the publishing world—she would advise him on dealings with their mutual publisher, James Munroe—and a raconteur with the “authority of a learned professor or high literary celebrity in her talk.” For the most part, as Elizabeth had intuited, Waldo was able to disregard the less compelling aspects of her personality that, to a man whose feminine ideal was still the nineteen-year-old invalid bride he had lost to tuberculosis, were inclined to “offend,” and accept her as a fellow being of “infinite capacity.” In
Megan Marshall (The Peabody Sisters)
The catch, of course, is that there’s usually a defect in discarded goods, no matter how good they look. In the case of upholstered furniture, everyone knows you have to turn it over and check for squirrels. Evaluating a new manuscript is like that. On the surface, in the form of a paper printout, it can appear to be beautiful and trouble-free—but look carefully at the electronic files, and any manner of wildlife could be lurking. My favorite example is a manuscript that consisted of over 300 separate MS Word files: the writer had started a new one every time he reached the bottom of a page.
Carol Fisher Saller (Moonlight Blogger)
Irish scribes had a way of gossiping and complaining in the margins: ‘I am very cold’ or ‘That’s a hard page and a weary work to read it’ or ‘Oh that a glass of good old wine were at my side.’ Their notes may have been for people working alongside them, because sometimes a team of four or more would work together on a single manuscript;19 but some were entirely personal, as when a scribe writes out the scene of Judas Iscariot betraying Christ with a kiss and adds in the margin: ‘Wretch!
Michael Pye (The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are)
The Last Iberian Jews Fig. 3. Decree of Expulsion of the Jews, Granada, March 31, 1492. Manuscript on paper; uncertified copy. Courtesy of Simancas (Valladolid), Archivo General de Simancas (PR 28-6). 24 Spain and Expulsion After Conversion: The Jews, 1391–1492 From the perspective of the Jews, the Catholic Monarchs were like the little girl with a little curl from Longfellow’s nursery rhyme: when they were good they were very, very good, and when they were bad, they were horrid.
Jeffrey Gorsky (Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain)
The more time you can put between you and your manuscript, the more fresh your eyes become and the more mistakes you’ll catch. Let a chapter rest for a day, you’ll see ways to improve it. Let your completed book rest a month or more and you’ll see stuff that’s long or that you want to skip. Read it out loud to get rid of awkward phrases and listen to your critique partners if they are good.
Dan Alatorre
Yes, what was your course of study at the university? Your father says you are very bright for a human. What did you study? Medicine? Theology?” “Um… library science.” Lan laughed. “You did experiments with books?” “No.” Beatrice had to smile. “Information Technology. I studied… well, how to be a good librarian. The best ways to preserve books and manuscripts and how to get that information to the people who need it. It’s called ‘library science,’ but—” “Oh!” Lan smiled, his or her round face creasing into a delighted smile. “You are a scribe.
Elizabeth Hunter (The Force of Wind (Elemental Mysteries, #3))
The Pretense That MFA Candidates Are Already Full-Blown Artists. MFA candidates are not full-blown artists in control of their craft. Many of them are unaware of their craft, on any level. Many of them are merely talented or have had the good or bad luck to write one piece interesting enough to impress a member of the admissions committee. Why is this pretense a flaw? Because it enables lazy teaching by promoting the idea that manuscripts submitted are fully considered representations of the best a particular writer has to offer, instead of what they most often are: desperate first drafts whipped off the night or morning before their workshop due date. Amazingly (and sadly), despite the fact that this is the nature of many workshop submissions, many participants still invest a lot of emotion in how well their stories are received by the workshop. And if the manuscripts are treated as if they're anything more than exercises in the training process, the responses can be damaging.
The New York Writers Workshop (The Portable MFA in Creative Writing (New York Writers Workshop))
At some point, Phil actually snuck into Kesey’s house and read part of the manuscript Kesey had been working on, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, before it was published. He came back and said, “Kesey’s a really good writer.
Bill Kreutzmann (Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead)
The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation—the role of chance. It
Leonard Mlodinow (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives)
getting it on with him in her head. She swallowed thickly and managed to squeak, "Fine." He studied her with his all-encompassing gaze a moment longer. Then he said, "What sort of secrets do you think she had?" Camille blinked, discombobulated. "What?" "Your gourd artist. What sorts of secrets does she keep?" Without thinking, she said, "She was spurned by a paperboy when she was a teenager and has been harboring a hatred for anyone tied to journalism ever since. She was planning on killing me and stuffing me in a gourd." Dylan shook his head. "Your talents are wasted. You should be writing fiction." Just like that, she went on guard. "I'm a journalist." "You're a writer," he insisted. "A good writer, and a good writer can write anything he wants." "If I'm good enough to write anything, why can't it be news? Why are you always trying to get me to change my focus?" She picked up her wine so she'd have something to do with her hand, but she didn't try to drink any, afraid she might choke. "Because your purpose isn't telling people what's already happened." Impassioned, he turned to bracket her with his legs. "It's entertaining people with your unique point of view." She remembered the harsh red letters her mother had scrawled on her partial manuscript and felt
Kate Perry (Looking for You (Laurel Heights, #4))
There’s a garden in the sky, waiting there for me. It’s a garden that Chris and I imagined years ago, while we lay on a hard black slate roof and stared up at the sun and the stars. He’s up there, whispering in the winds to tell me that’s where the purple grass grows. They’re all up there waiting for me. So, forgive me for being tired, too tired to stay. I have lived long enough, and can say my life was full of happiness as well as sadness. Though some might not see it that way. I love all of you, each equally. I love Darren and Deirdre and wish them good luck throughout their lives, as I wish the same for your child-to-be, Jory. The Dollanganger Saga is over. You’ll find my last manuscript in my private vault. Do with it what you will. It was meant to be this way. I have no place to go but there. No one needs me more than Chris does. But please don’t ever say I failed in reaching my most important goal. I may not have been the prima ballerina I set out to be. Nor was I the perfect wife or mother—but I did manage to convince one person, at last, that he did have the right father. And it wasn’t too late, Bart. It’s never too late.
V.C. Andrews
So I saw that there is nothing better for men than that they should be happy in their work, for that is what they are here for, and no one can bring them back to life to enjoy what will be in the future, so let them enjoy it now. —Ecclesiastes 3:22 (TLB) Recently, I learned that a book on friendship that I’d written with my best friend, Melanie, was rejected by a publisher who had been very positive about it for over two years. I was devastated. All those months and years of writing, rewriting, and then reworking it again…only to have it rejected in the end. I was ready to give up my career altogether, retire, and concentrate on biking, swimming, kayaking, and traveling. Then I read something my pen pal Oscar had written about his own retirement twenty-five years earlier. He wrote that in retirement we must have direction and purpose, accept change, remain curious and confident, communicate, and be committed. The longer I looked at his list, the more it spoke to me. Why, those are the very attributes I need to be a good writer, I thought. So I decided to buckle down and rework other unsold manuscripts I’d written over the years. Using Oscar’s plan of direction, purpose, confidence, and commitment helped me to stop telling people that I didn’t have any marketing genes and to keep busy rewriting and looking for different publishers. I may never sell all of my work, but I’m living a life filled with purpose. And I’m a whole lot happier in my semiretirement than if I was just playing every day, all day. Father, give me purpose in life whether it’s volunteer work, pursuing dreams, reworking an old career, or finding a new way to use the talents You’ve given me. —Patricia Lorenz Digging Deeper: Prv 16:9; Rom 12:3–8
Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2014)
When it comes to the New Testament, we can be confident we are reading from accurate sources, because we have so many ancient copies to compare. For many ancient texts there are only a handful of manuscripts in existence. We have only nine or ten good copies of Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars. The best-preserved, non-biblical ancient writing we have is Homer’s Iliad, of which there are only 643 copies. Compare these numbers to the New Testament, which is based on nearly six thousand Greek manuscripts plus over nine thousand ancient copies in other languages. If that were not enough, even if all of these copies were lost, we could reconstruct all but eleven verses of the New Testament from ancient quotations of the Bible.
Douglas M. Beaumont (The Message Behind the Movie: How to Engage with a Film Without Disengaging Your Faith)
I am all for encouraging the arts and literature, but I do think writers should seek out their own publishers and write their own introductions. The perils of doing this sort of thing was illustrated when I was prevailed upon to write a short introduction to a book about a dreaded man-eater who had taken a liking to the flesh of the good people of Dogadda, near Lansdowne. The author of the book could hardly write a decent sentence, but he managed to string together a lengthy account of the leopard's depradations. He was so persistent, calling on me or ringing me up that I finally did the introduction. He then wanted me to edit or touch up his manuscript; but this I refused to do. I would starve if I had to sit down and rewrite other people's books. But he prevailed upon me to give him a photograph. Months later, the book appeared, printed privately of course. And there was my photograph, and a photograph of the dead leopard after it had been hunted down. But the local printer had got the captions mixed up. The dead animal's picture earned the line: 'Well-known author Ruskin Bond.' My picture carried the legend: 'Dreaded man-eater, shot after it had killed its 26th victim.' The printer's devil had turned me into a serial killer. Now
Ruskin Bond (Roads to Mussoorie)
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny." --Thomas Jefferson   "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government." --Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 28, 1787   "An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."- Col. Jeff Cooper (1920-2006)   “When bad men combine, the good must associate: else they will fall one by one, an  unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” -- Edmund Burke     Interlude   “Da, I’ve got a question for you.  It’s a question I’ve thought about since I joined this session.”  This came from Michelle.   “OK.  What’s your question, Mick?”   “We’ve always read the Bible and tried to be good Christians.  I realize you had to do it for us to survive but doesn’t the Bible say, ‘Do not kill’?”  Michelle asked.   The old man looked at his granddaughter and then looked around at the rest of his grandchildren before answering. “Actually, if you go back to the early manuscripts of the Bible, it says, ‘Thou shalt not commit murder.’  What Reggie, Carter, the other residents here, your parents, some of you and I have done, we
R. deLyndesay (Trace of Survival, Vol. 4)
for Communion—it was the only rite that made Arthur self-conscious about his unbelief. He could not, in good conscience, partake, but not to do so seemed a much too public declaration of his lack of faith. So, as the sermon droned on (it was the precentor this morning) and as the congregants waited their turn at the Communion rail, Arthur read the rest of his manuscript, making occasional marks with the red pen, keenly aware of those two keys staring up at him from his table.
Charlie Lovett (The Lost Book of the Grail)
1 Kings 8:56 Praise be to the Lord, who has given rest to his people Israel just as he promised. Not one word has failed of all the good promises he gave through his servant Moses.
Sarah O. Annie (Beginner's Guide To Christianity, Buddhism And Zen: Essential Handbook Of The Bible And Buddha (3 Manuscripts In A Book))
Sicily--- Oranges, pistachios, and/or aubergine. Sicilian food a product of immense, diverse history. Have sardines! Try the orange cake. You'll find it all over, but there used to be a good one in Taormina. I shake my head in amazement. Somehow, it feels like Dad had been quietly guiding me. Tuscany--- Wild boar is good but tomatoes are better. Nothing else! Please say something with Chiara's tomatoes. I want to help her. Farm is a century old and sells some obscure varieties. Tomato salads, tomato bread soup, panzanella. And here too, Leo and I had organically found the path my father laid out for us. The notes on Liguria are less specific, but when I read his scrawled handwriting, I smile to myself. Liguria--- Was thinking about beans, but basil a good opinion. Oh boy, I cannot wait to show that note to Leo. Basil a good option! Leo. I sit and write with an open heart, not shying away from treacly memories of cut oranges shared in the sea. Pushing my cynicism to the side and allowing the love I have for food, for Italy, for my father, to run from my heart down my veins to my fingers and onto the page.
Lizzy Dent (Just One Taste)