April 23, 2010
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Quotes from other people, since they say it better
I wonder if I will have to walk the Inca Trail now that Donald Miller has. I read “Blue Like Jazz” and had to sleep at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Now, reading “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,” I might have to go to Machu Picchu. Here are some quotes. Because I took the time to type them.
“No girl who plays the role of a hero dates a guy who uses her. She knows who she is. She just forgets for a little while.”
“if I have a hope, it’s that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.”
“At the end, their bodies are slower, they are not as easily distracted, they do less work, and they think and feel about a life lived rather than look forward to a life getting started. He didn’t know what the point of the journey was, but he did believe we were designed to search for and find something. And he wondered out loud if the point wasn’t the search but the transformation the search creates.”
“You’re a writer. You know what to do. You put something on the page. Your life is a blank page. you write on it.”
“People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen.”
“Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen.”
“The second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose.”
“I was watching Star Wars recently and wondered what made the movie so good. If I paused the DVD on any frame, I could point toward any major character and say exactly what that person wanted. No character with a vague ambition.”
“You have to take your character to the place where he just can’t take it anymore. You’ve been there, haven’t you? you’ve been out on the ledge. The marriage is over now; the dream is over now; nothing good can come from this. Writing a story isn’t about making your peaceful fantasies come true. the whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person. You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.”
“They made knights’ outfits and rode bikes at each other with javelins made from long sticks with rolled up towels on the end. Only the towels had been dipped in gasoline and lit. I looked over at Kaj as though to say he was crazy, and he reminded me that men don’t bond unless they risk their lives together, and that Canadians enjoy free health care.”
“I asked Susan if she believed there was one true love for every person. She essentially said not. And she said that with her husband sitting right there in the audience. She said she and her husband believed they were a cherished prize for each other, and they would probably drive any other people mad. She said he had married a guy, and he was just a guy. He wasn’t going to make all her problems go away, because he was just a guy. And that freed her to really love him as a guy, not as an ultimate problem solver. And because her husband believed she was just a girl, he was free to really love her too. Neither needed the other to make everything okay. They were simply content to have good company through life’s conflicts.”
“A good storyteller doesn’t just tell a better story, though. He invites other people into the story with him, giving them a better story too.”
A quote from Frankl, a holocaust survivor: “We had to learn ourselves, and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must exist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets before each individual.”
