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Michael Simms: Writing Prompt # 8 – Start a file of your favorite short passages
Whenever I need inspiration, I go back to a collection of my favorite poems and prose passages that I keep in an electronic file on my desktop. They consistently remind me why I love writing and reading. As you may be aware, I’ve posted my favorite poems individually in Vox Populi, but of equal importance to me are passages of beautifully composed prose. Below are 10 passages I truly love. If you want, you may share your favorite prose passage(s) in the comment section below and tell us why they’re important to you.– MS
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“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
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“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies- ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’” – Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” ― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
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“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
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“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” – Jack Kerouac, On The Road
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“To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not ‘interactive’ with a set of rules or options, as games are: reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, Staying Awake
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“In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves, cheaters, etc., full of filthy puddles, horrid rocks, precipitiums, an ocean of adversity, an heavy yoke, wherein infirmities and calamities overtake and follow one another, as the sea-waves; and if we scape Scylla, we fall foul on Charybdis, and so in perpetual fear, labour, anguish, we run from one plague, one mischief, one burden to another, duram servientes servitutem, and you may as soon separate weight from lead, heat from fire, moistness from water, brightness from the sun, as misery, discontent, care, calamity, danger, from a man.” — Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
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“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” — Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
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“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.” — Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
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“Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man – then the worth of Miss Amelia’s liquor can be understood. Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comprehended. A spinner who has thought only of the loom, the dinner pail, the bed, and then the loom again – this spinner might drink some on a Sunday and come across a marsh lily. And in his palm he might hold this flower, examining the golden dainty cup, and in him suddenly might come a sweetness keen as pain. A weaver might look up suddenly and see for the first time the cold, weird radiance of midnight January sky, and a deep fright at his own smallness stop his heart.” — Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
Compilation copyright 2023 Michael Simms
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“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
Zora Neale Hurston, from “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”
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Perfect. Thank you, Matt.
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Wonderful!
Beth Spencer
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Thanks, Beth!
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I love that you included the quote from “A River Runs Through It,” as that’s one of my favorites, too. Here’s another:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still, and always, want waking. We should amass half-dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead, we watch television and miss the show.” Annie Dillard, “The Writing Life”
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Oh, Laura, thank you! I love Annie D. Often I drive down Penn thinking of her as a little girl who wore wings and ran down the street trying to fly, a scene from An American Life.
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Hi Michael, I just did this for a poetry group I’m in. Thought you might be interested in my prompts. Charlie
Hi Sunday Poets. Here are some prompts. They are phrases or sentiments that struck my fantasy over the last few weeks of reading or listening. Pick one or two or even more and let them spark some engaged writing, or not. As always, write what your muse dictates.
Charlie
“We seem to have inherited, along with its two or three blessings, the manifold curse of psychoanalysis: the assumption that the grounds of discontent, anger, rage, despair—‘unhappiness’ in general—reside within the sufferer rather than outside of him.” Joyce Carol Oats in a New Yorker interview.
“Faith is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.”
Emily Dickenson
“Everyone wishes a measure of mystery in their life that they have done nothing in particular to deserve.” Jim Harrison, “Revenge,” in Legends of the Fall, Delta, 1979
“Must we live twice in order to love once?” Terry Blackhawk, Maume, Maume.
“What’s a photo but a mirror?” Terry Blackhawk, Maume, Maume, Alice Green Co., 2022.
“If you want to succeed in society, you have to let yourself learn a lot of things you already know from people who don’t know anything about them.” Albert Camus, in Travels in the Americas, University of Chicago Press, 2023.
“Pretend for a moment, nothing is lost.” Richard Blanco, from his poem, “Looking for the Gulf Motel”
“Human laws can be revoked but it turns out the physical ones cannot.” Eugene Vodolezkin in his novel, The Aviator.
“Paradice is the absence of time.” Vodolezkin, The Aviator.
“Have I gotten into stench and shame, or into light and joy? That’s the whole trouble, because everything on earth is a riddle.” Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“No mortal man comes through life unscathed or knows real happiness. An unbruised human being has never yet been raised.” Iphigenia at Aulis, Euripides.
“My friends from the prison, they ask unto me
‘How good, how good, does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously
‘Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?’”
Bob Dylan, Ballad in Plain D
Some nuggets from Gogal, Dead Souls:
“Some people like the priest, others the priest’s wife.”
“Here is one who, as they say, is badly cut but strongly stitched together!”
“There are people who exist in this world not as primary objects but as foreign specks or spots on objects.”
And here’s a couple zingers from Tu Fu (a T’ang poet 713-770)
“Why is life so full of goodbyes?”
“Generosity reaches to the clouds.”
Finally, some Steven Wright:
“Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time… I think I’ve forgotten this before.”
“The other day I walked into a handwear store and asked for a wireless extension chord.”
“What’s another word for thesaurus?”
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Thanks, Charlie. These prompts are helpful.
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and “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” – Sylvia Plath
Thank you, Michael Simms
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Thank YOU, Marina.
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“If we’re not supposed to
dance,
why all this music?”
Gregory Orr
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Hahaha. Exactly.
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To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. – Mary Oliver
(one of many of Mary Oliver’s thoughts I have in my journal as a reminder/inspiration)
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Yes, our endless and proper work.
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“But he vouchsafed no answer, whether from astonishment at my words, preoccupation with what he was doing, regard for convention, hardness of hearing, respect for holy ground, fear of danger, slowness of understanding, or by the manager’s orders.” –Marcel Proust
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Great list!
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Thanks, Michael, for these prompts.
sun and moon
the up and down
of life too
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Lovely three line poem, John. Thank you!
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“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” — Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
How good that you do that, Michael! — type passages that you love!
I have a “Personal anthology” in my computer, in which I type every poem I like. Typing them teaches me so much — and also makes them sing under my fingers so much better than just reading them. I have been doing this since 1986 — my anthology has 1092 pages…
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Very cool, Laure-Anne. 1100 pages singing under your fingers…
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“I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times when I would rather be dead the thought that I could never write another poem has so far stopped me. I think this is an ignoble attitude. I would rather die for love, but I haven’t.”
Frank O’Hara
He was the poet of my youth. I cherish and delight in him still, not least because to read him again is to celebrate the wonderful years of my 20s, all full of friends, lovers, and poetry.
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Lovely response. Thank you.
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Baldwin is a very hesitant and not decisive person in contrary to his writing. The conflict of content and style is very obvious. His major works just appeared in al Sharjah in Arabic translation with minor misprints. No problem with that. What I could not understand is his mixed feelings towards men and women, faith and blasphemy, etc.. but he drills deep with his pen inside human beings.
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Thank you, Saleh. James Baldwin is one of my heroes. He stood up for what he believed and gave himself permission to follow his own path. He also had an elegant prose style. When I used to teach composition, I often assigned A Stranger in the Village, an essay about his experience of racism in America and Europe.
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