Some (perhaps slightly out-of-context) thoughts on language and magic:
"If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart— reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life. Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking: that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded. But somewhere in the heat of magic that boundary between word and thing ruptures. It cracks, and the one flows back into the other, and the two melt together and fuse. Language gets tangled up with the world it describes... Can a man who can cast a spell ever really grow up?"
from The Magicians by Lev Grossman
What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we we write, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire next minute, I am so much further on. - C.S. Lewis
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
I Am Not Your Momma
Inspired by the poem "I Am Not a Taco" by Santino J. Rivera and my amazing colleague/friend Mr. Steven Arenas! [You can read about...
-
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book was fantastic! I LOVE the kooky/creepy ...
-
Written on a "writing marathon" walk around ASU campus during CAWP Summer Institute. 2017-06-14 Signs of Life I do not alway...
-
June 23, 2018 New York City How did I write what I wrote? Settling in. A folding chair. Notebook open on the table in front of me. W...