Quarantine Finished Quotes

I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house doesn’t have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: “City?” I replied: “London.” “Can you spell that please?” I looked at her and saw that she wasn’t joking. “L-O-N-D-O-N,” I said. “Country?” “England.” “Can you spell that?” I spelled England. She typed for a moment and said: “The computer won’t accept England. Is that a real country?” I assured her it was. “Try Britain,” I suggested. I spelled that, too—twice (we got the wrong number of T’s the first time)—and the computer wouldn’t take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK, and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn’t think of anything else to suggest. “It’ll take France,” the girl said after a minute. “I beg your pardon?” “You can have ‘London, France.’ ” “Seriously?” She nodded. “Well, why not?” So she typed “London, France,” and the system was happy. I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: “Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?” “That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.” “Shoot,” she said and looked chagrined. Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can’t identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it’s spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

You’ll have stopped making sentences in quarantine, In the special ward set aside for sentence making once the outline is finished, The way you were taught in school. Instead, writing becomes intrinsic to the act of thinking, Completely intertwined with it. You’re also learning to trust the ability to work in your head And learning how your mind works, Which is something you may not have noticed before. We’re always hastening to be done writing, But we’re also hastening to get out of the presence of our thoughts. Everything about thinking makes us nervous. We don’t believe there’s much of value to be found there. We don’t know when we’ll come to the end of our thoughts, But we think it may be soon. Why? Your mind is silent yet filled with voices and uncertainty. The uncertainty you feel is one of the places sentences will come from, And experience will make your uncertainty more certain. Stop fearing what you’ll find as you think. Give yourself over to this experiment. Your intentions will diverge from themselves. Your starting point may lead to places you didn’t imagine, Places that ask you to reconsider your starting point. You may feel yourself clinging to your original intention. Why? Because it came first? Why not follow the crosscurrents of your thinking And see where they lead? I don’t mean follow them blindly. Allow your thinking to adjust your intentions in the light of your discoveries. This may mean relinquishing your original intention If you find a better one as you write. The piece you’re writing is simply the one that happens to get written. If you’d begun another way, made a different turn, even started in a different mood, A different piece would have come into being. The writer’s world is full of parallel universes. You discover, word by word, the one you discover. Ten minutes later—another hour of thought—and you would have found your way into a different universe. The piece is permeable to the world around it. It’s responsive to time itself, to the very hour of its creation. This is an immensely freeing thing to understand. It liberates you from the anxiety of sequence, The fear that there’s only one way through your subject, Only one useful approach. Learn to accept the discontinuity between yourself and what you write, The discontinuity between your will, your intention, your plan And the discoveries you make as you work. Abandon the idea of predetermination, The shaping force of your intention, Until you’ve given it up for good. Bring your intentions, by all means, but accept that the language we use Is a language of accidentals, always skewing away from the course we set. This is something not to mourn but to revel in— Not only for the friction and sideslip inherent in the language But for freeing us from the narrowness of our preconceptions.

Beautiful.” “Typical,” I tossed back and he growled low in his throat, the sound setting my skin on fire. “You didn’t let me finish, Tate.” He dragged me closer still so I entered the cage his body made and his rich and spicy cologne called to me from his skin. “Beautiful would be an insult to you tonight. Hypnotising is closer. But enslaving is the closest.

It was like that feeling you got while reading a book, glancing at the pages left or the percentage remaining and seeing that you were coming towards the end. In a way it was exciting because you were about to get all of the answers you'd been waiting for, about to find out who survived and who had to pay the ultimate price. But it was terrifying too, because you knew that this right here was when the pace was about to pick up, all the shit was going to hit the fan, and everything was about to collide in an explosion of words and pain and adrenaline that just might leave you a deranged mess on the floor once you were finished with it.

In a way it was exciting because you were about to get all of the answers you'd been waiting for, about to find out who survived and who had to pay the ultimate price. But it was terrifying too, because you knew that this right here was when the pace was about to pick up, all the shit was going to hit the fan, and everything was about to collide in an explosion of words and pain and adrenaline that just might leave you a deranged mess on the floor once you were finished with it.

It was like that feeling you got while reading a book, glancing at the pages left or the percentage remaining and seeing that you were coming towards the end. In a way it was exciting because you were about to get all of the answers you'd been waiting for, about to find out who survived and who had to pay the ultimate price. But it was terrifying too, because you knew that this right here was when the pace was about to pick up, all the shit was going to hit the fan, and everything was about to collide in an explosion of words and pain and adrenaline that just might leave you a deranged mess on the floor once you were finished with it. And even then, there was the very real possibility that it would haunt you afterwards, the characters lingering in your mind like old friends instead of constructs of your imagination.

When I’m finished here, I plan to get down on my knees between the legs of my goddess and pray for rain.