I don’t know how or in what way or if it’s romantic or if you’re just the best friend I’ll ever have. But whatever form it is, I love you because I’ve been closer to you than anyone else I’ve ever known. And I’ll never forget that. I can’t do anything but love you, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I hurt you.
You can’t make everybody love you. It’s an exercise in futility, and it’s probably not even a good idea to try.
I think you should be a little afraid of what you put out there. A little nervous that people are going to see through it and they’re going to see you. Nobody likes the idea of this, but I like it: That there needs to be blood on the page. I think there should be some piece of you left on the page so when you put it out there you’re a little nervous.
So I’m the guy who’s supposed to put the little rubber puck into the back of the net. Pretty simple. The only thing is, there’s a 6’5” monster wearing pillows standing in my way — and for some reason the dude can do full splits on skates. It’s insane.
I remember the turning point moment. I was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my roommates, and it went into a backstory flashback set in high medieval Germany. ”Why are you sighing?” one asked, noticing that I’d laid back and deflated rather gloomily. I answered: ”She’s not of sufficiently high social status to have domesticated rabbits in Northern Europe in that century. But I guess it’s not fair to press a point since the research on that hasn’t been published yet.” It made me laugh, also made me think about how much I don’t know, since I hadn’t known that a week before. For all the visible mistakes in these shows, there are even more invisible mistakes that I make myself because of infinite details historians haven’t figured out yet, and possibly never will. There are thousands of artifacts in museums whose purposes we don’t know. There are bits of period clothing whose functions are utter mysteries. There are entire professions that used to exist that we now barely understand. No history is accurate, not even the very best we have.
All girls continue to be taught when they are young, if not by their parents then by the culture around them, that they must earn the right to be loved — that “femaleness” is not good enough. This is a female’s first lesson in the school of patriarchal thinking and values. She must earn love. She is not entitled. She must be good enough to be loved. And good is always defined by someone else, someone on the outside.
We often think that the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writer’s relation to his characters, but it’s also accomplished via the writer’s relation to his reader. You make a rarefied place (rarefied in language, in form; perfected in many inarticulable beauties – the way two scenes abut; a certain formal device that self-escalates; the perfect place at which a chapter cuts off); and then welcome the reader in. She can’t believe that you believe in her that much; that you are so confident that the subtle nuances of the place will speak to her; she is flattered. And they do speak to her. This mode of revision, then, is ultimately about imagining that your reader is as humane, bright, witty, experienced and well intentioned as you, and that, to communicate intimately with her, you have to maintain the state, through revision, of generously imagining her. You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: “No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.”
And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.
All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!
I have a duty!
Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (Discworld, #30; Tiffany Aching, #1)
So this is vibing really really hard for me in terms of Active classes in general, and Jade and Jake in particular. I think the active/passive system is unfurling into something that is as profound and fascinating as the Aspects themselves in my head and I am really really excited about it.
(via revolutionaryduelist)
I had many fascinating and enjoyable phone calls about the books while he was writing them–the phone would ring: ‘Listen to this’, and he would read a passage he was particularly pleased with, and I could see why; or ‘I’m not sure what should happen now’ and he would tell me the plot up to that moment, and we’d talk about its possible direction. Then he’d say ‘Right, I know what happens now.‘ The call was finished, and I’d hear no more, but when I read the final text there’d never be even an echo of our conversation: something had struck him from a completely different direction and was better than anything we’d discussed during that call. Genius.
I miss those calls, his company, his humour, and his erudition, but we have his books, the deep moral sense that pervades and imbues them, their supreme craftsmanship, his skill in writing works to which we return again and again, his characters, his puns, his footnotes. I miss the challenges he set me, and the pleasure involved in their achievement, sometimes to his considerable surprise. There won’t be another like him, but his values will influence and inspire his readers for as long as his books are read. Children become adults, teenagers become professors and heads of industry. And as Terry influenced them, they influence the world.
Colin Smythe (Pratchett’s publisher and agent), “The Terry Pratchett Diary”
(via noirandchocolate)
Colin as Conductor of Light
(via grassangel)
When you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.
just moving along like everyone else 