Lynne Sharon Schwartz Quotes

#1. 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

#2. In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

#3. Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.
the Tai Chi instructor

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

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

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

#5. Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

#6. 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

#7. What I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

#8. Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

#9. 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

#10. But if the words struck her only lightly when she was nine, they stayed with her, gaining in density, to insinuate themselves whenever her performance fell short of perfection. They were less a mortification, she feared, than an actual statement of fact: B+ is all you deserve.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

#11. 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

#12. What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

#13. 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

#14. Getting away from being 'a good girl' is important because it's impossible to be a 'good girl' and a writer at the same time.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

#15. 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

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

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

#17. 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

#18. Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz