Chila Woychik Quotes

#1. This isn't a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It's a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it's printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.

Chila Woychik

#2. Middle-age should be shot. Things about it gall me. First, that those younger despise the thought of getting old, and, hence, me. Second, that those older despise the thought of me being younger, and, hence, me. So here I am, pressed from both sides, forced to wear blinders - FULL SPEED AHEAD!

Chila Woychik

#3. I'm a rat. I used to believe in the Golden Rule but now question it. It's too easy to be snarky at those who are snarky toward me. I like how it feels - the yellow cheese giving way between pointed teeth. My tail begins to twitch.

Chila Woychik

#4. Today I fed him right off the bat, and only checked Facebook twice.

Chila Woychik

#5. In this book, much is metaphorical, not as it seems. It's written for writing's sake, as if I were to say, "Let me tell you I'm dying." Well of course I am. So are you.

Chila Woychik

#6. I should have been conceived during Woodstock; it's in my blood: that burning desire to turn an absolute on its head and see what's underneath. I'm as random as I can be and as responsible as I should be. Attempting to fuse the two makes for interesting days.

Chila Woychik

#7. I think that's why I write - the not knowing and the blasted good feeling I get out of it all.

Chila Woychik

#8. When reading a book, one hopes it doesn't turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.

Chila Woychik

#9. Pulitzer is a word but accomplishment is an aura.

Chila Woychik

#10. Writing analogies are as abundant as ants at a picnic. We love nothing better than a good analogy, a "life-is-like-this" on the page. I breathe and out pops another analogy. As of this moment, I am sole owner of 1,643 analogies.

Chila Woychik

#11. The setting sun threatened to consume me - it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and walked away; I would live another day.

Chila Woychik

#12. A mist rises from a nearby mound. It could be me, that mist, or simply the caretaker's mower-dust. If the breeze blows just right, I'll ghost your solid, entwine your hair. Promise me you won't shampoo, but carry me along, tiny dust-particles of me.

Chila Woychik

#13. At least I could relate to Rose's sense of adventure and Harriet Jones' wacky determination and ingrained sense of responsibility. I can stomach the Tardis when my heroines are in place.

Chila Woychik

#14. I'm engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton's A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it's a stanza too short for my morphing existence. So I write my own.

Chila Woychik

#15. I die with the dying light, yet shine brighter as the darkness approaches. Soon I'll be whittled to bone and stripped clean through, nothing left but a skeleton on which to hang a hat. But have no fear, I look good in hats.

Chila Woychik

#16. He was only my Savior. My life was His, yet my love was bound in a selfish and worldly heart and it would take years to manage it loose.

Chila Woychik

#17. You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty - done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.

Chila Woychik

#18. Without the hard we stay too soft, and heaven is reduced to myths like life. Theology aside, it's plain to see that God forbids we get too comfortable.

Chila Woychik

#19. Support our troops!" we cry, but I say, "Love our veterans!" And when he neglects church, take him cookies anyway. Sing him a song. Pet his cat.

Chila Woychik

#20. I've had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

Chila Woychik

#21. This world rubs me raw, scours me smooth like an SOS pad put to a grease-caked skillet. And pain: it stabs and scrapes and pulls me back to earth, my final B&B, that worm-spun cot of cool black sod.

Chila Woychik

#22. If a book can save - redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane - surely, there must be a God.

Chila Woychik

#23. I have a bad habit of dropping verbal pellets to get a reaction, like Ursula LeGuin's "A novelist's business is lying" (that particular one got a lot of attention on Facebook), or, "Why is it that Christians hate the word 'sex'?

Chila Woychik

#24. I speak, I speak, and truth at that. Writers are a curious breed: brooding, fickle, alternately loving and hating their work - and each other. You're my friend? Don't pick up that pen!

Chila Woychik

#25. Nonfiction. I didn't choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

Chila Woychik

#26. God, O God, where art thou? Thou art as distant to me as the lady combing rice in the Yunnan Province of China or a piece of floating space debris circling Pegasi. In this feeling-dead world of post traumatic stress, skepticism is king, queen, and court jester.

Chila Woychik

#27. A writer hopes never to offend, but if he must, pray let him offend the gods before the reviewers.

Chila Woychik

#28. I am Frustration. I am Memory-Lost. Sometimes I read a line a dozen times before it sticks. My creative force has slipped. I type slower, speak slower, think at a snail's pace. I'm Life shapeshifted by Post Traumatic Stress, bastardized by Fate.

Chila Woychik

#29. I've learned to lick
my own foul wounds
and prize the taste of ache.

Chila Woychik

#30. I continue to live inside a dichotomy: what was and what shall be. The pain in my skull is me trying to mesh the two.

Chila Woychik

#31. Texting is a sex toy: pleasurable but a substitute for the real thing. Love has a face. Video chatting is good, but who's comfortable enough to share their "bed hair"? Love isn't about pat answers.

Chila Woychik

#32. I read a book, am vortexed in with no escape; my face contorts, eyelids frost, breath comes short, body longs, heart stop-starts. Who's to say too much won't kill me? Who's to say I care?

Chila Woychik

#33. I've never had a rat, never chased one. I chase my own tail and that's enough. I must now make plans for the day I catch it.

Chila Woychik

#34. When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam's cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

Chila Woychik

#35. Writing makes me hard, like a fisherman, and brown from the heat. Tossing out and reeling in is a job for visionaries and those with calloused hands.

Chila Woychik