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Lynne Sharon Schwartz QUOTES

Lynne Sharon Schwartz QUOTES

1 " The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Not Now, Voyager: A Memoir

2 " I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now? "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books

3 " Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Leaving Brooklyn

4 " Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , The Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W. G. Sebald

5 " I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books

6 " Reading teaches us receptivity....It teaches us to receive, in stillness and attentiveness, a voice possessed temporarily, on loan....And as we grow accustomed to receiving books in stillness and attentiveness, so we can grow to receive the world, also possessed temporarily. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz

7 " Head held high and lips parted, she breathed in the music, sending it through her torso and arms and legs the way the Tai Chi teacher told us to breath the air, transforming it into energy, motion.
Dancing is the body's song, and Bess sang. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz

8 " How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books

9 " How did she do it, I'd always wondered. Dancing with Q., I understood. Once in a while the pain falls asleep on the job, and the experienced sufferer knows enough to seize such moments swiftly and without thought - for when we realize we're actually dancing, the jolt of joy wakens the pain.

Laura Acosta "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz

10 " My head aches, my eyes burn, my arms and legs have given up, and my face in the mirror has a grayish cast. The bed, across the room, calls in its unmistakable lover's croon, Come to me, come, only I can make you truly happy, oh, how happy I'll make you, don't resist, remember how you moan with pleasure the instant we touch..... "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , The Fatigue Artist

11 " Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , The Fatigue Artist

12 " Like a giant doomed to eat damsels, Q. must fill a vast daily quota of attention and adulation from varied sources. In a small town he might run out of people, but by keeping in constant motion, he's in no such danger. The only danger is to those suppliers of attention who expect some continuity of response, who fail to understand that for Q. people are an inexhaustible natural resource for his sustenance and delight, like air or water or sunshine. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , The Fatigue Artist

13 " Among some tossed-out books of my daughter's which I rescued...was one too awful to live. I returned it to the trash, resisting the urge to say a few parting words. All day long the thought of its mingling with chicken bones and olive pits nagged at me. Half a dozen times I removed it and replaced it, like an executioner with scruples about capital punishment. Finally I put it on a high shelf where I wouldn't have to see it. Life imprisonment. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books

14 " Nor can I throw a book away. I have given many away and ripped a few in half, but as with warring nations, destruction shows regard: the enemy is a power to reckon with. Throwing a book out shows contempt for an effort of the spirit. Not that I haven't tried. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books

15 " Yet I have come to distrust book jackets calculated to prick desire like a Bloomingdale's window, as if you could wear what you read. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz

16 " Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books

17 " Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books

18 " In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books

19 " Yet when we do manage to create ourselves anew, isn’t there always a suspicion that the new identity fits over the old like a second skin, at times itchy or uncomfortably tight, not quite covering the most vulnerable patches? "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books

20 " Few subjects are inherently dull: language is where dullness or liveliness resides. "

― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books