[PUBLIC POST] Inspirational quotes and advice

[ljwrites]

Do you have any quotes or advice, whether directly related to writing or not, that you find uplifting, thought-provoking, or otherwise helpful in your writing?

I'm a bit of a quotes hound, and lately I found this bit  from an interview to be inspirational for my own project:

I believe fiction is also a kind of history. Even historical sources from modern times and later may consist of constructed documents, and sometimes fiction may tell the truth better than truth itself.
- Jong-il Rah, Professor Emeritus at Gacheon University and biography author

This gave me a big confidence boost because I'm writing about a real-life figure who lived too long ago (1st century B.C.) and about whom too few sources remain to write a proper biography. I fully acknowledge my project is a novel and not a biography, but it's heartening to think that I'm telling the story of my heroine's life in my own way.

Here's another part from the same interview that resonated with me:

The greatest injustice is to silence a person. . . . The elders used to tell me, if someone dies without having their say their untold story will return to haunt us. The North Korean regime [which executed former second-in-command Sung-taek Jang, the subject of Professor Rah's biography] might have thought they could erase a person's being by killing the body, but the past doesn't disappear like that.
- Jong-il Rah

There's something comforting about the thought that stories are durable across time and will outlast the destruction of bodies, evidence, and last words. You can steal the breath from a person but not their words; their words will be freed of their confines and float on the winds of the world until someone hears their music and breathes them into life again. In this way stories, no matter how crushed and silenced, will swirl around and around until they are heard. I would like to believe this is true.

Comments

[ljwrites]

Those are some great inspirations! I think everyone needs those reminders--that you can take it a little at a time, don't panic, you've got this, it's not a matter of inspiration or mood but steady work.

Ooh, Dune quote! Yeah, that's a great series for intense quotes. I like the Litany against Fear: "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

[inkdust]

Totally forgot about the fear one. I used to come back to that one a lot. Petty irritations, though - I actually saw the Dune miniseries before I read the book, where they trimmed that quote down by about half: "I will not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. I will face my fear, I will let it pass through me. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain." So it got stuck in my head that way, flow-wise, to where the actual thing seemed wordy when I read it. Sigh.

It does make me think about different forms of media, though, and the impact of hearing a quote versus reading it. I don't think one is blanketly more powerful than the other, but for any given quote and a person's relationship to it, I have a feeling that one format or the other ends up winning out.