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Top Paul Harding Quotes

Browse top 22 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Paul Harding.

Favorite Paul Harding Quotes

1. "But it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating." ~ Paul Harding
2. "Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed." ~ Paul Harding
3. "Everything is made perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so. No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place. What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?" ~ Paul Harding
4. "Howard resented the ache in his heart. He resented that it was there every morning when he woke up... He resented equally the ache and resentment itself. He resented his resentment because it was a sign of his limitations of spirit and humility, no matter that he understood that such was each man's burden. He resented the ache because it was uninvited, seemed imposed, a sentence, and, despite the encouragement he gave himself each morning, it baffled him because it was there whether the day was good or bad, whether he witnessed major kindness or minor transgression, suffered sourceless grief or spontaneous joy." ~ Paul Harding
5. "There is my father whispering in my ear, Be still still still. And yet you change everything. What was the marsh like, waiting for the storm before you came and kneeled in the water? It was nothing. Watch after you leave the water, now cold and regretful, miles from home, certain of the belt on your backside, the cold shoulder, the extra chores; watch. Watch the water heal itself of your presence--not to repair injury but to offer itself again should you care to risk another strapping [...]." ~ Paul Harding
6. "…and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love..." ~ Paul Harding
7. "Howard thought, Is it not true: A move oft he head, a step to the left or right, and we change from wise, decent, loyal people to conceited fools? Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely" ~ Paul Harding
8. "I loved her totally, and while I loved her, the world was love. Once she was gone, the world seemed to prove nothing more than ruins and the smoldering dreams of monsters." ~ Paul Harding
9. "Don't write your books for people who won't like them. Give yourself wholly to the kind of book you want to write and don't try to please readers who like something different. Otherwise, you'll end up with the worst of both worlds. I write lyrical, introspective, experiential books concerned with consciousness and perception. If a reader wants to know what my protagonist's insurance policies are, he'll be better off curling up with a nice cup of chamomile tea and an actuarial table. Similarly, don't write your books for bad readers. Your books will suffer from bad readers no matter what, so write them for brilliant, big-brained and big-hearted people who will love you for feeding their minds with feasts of beauty." ~ Paul Harding
10. "But a huge part of being a writer is discovering your own intellectual and aesthetic autonomy, and how you best get the best words onto the page." ~ Paul Harding
11. "Don't confine truth to fact. Imaginative truth is as powerful, and often enough, more so than fact." ~ Paul Harding
12. "I was just delighted to be a legitimate, for-real published author." ~ Paul Harding
13. "If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game." ~ Paul Harding
14. "Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth." ~ Paul Harding
15. "I worry that if whatever pops into your head at any instant immediately goes online, you lose the crucial time for your thoughts to simmer and evolve and build up nuance, depth and empathy." ~ Paul Harding
16. "I'm no online whiz, but I'm not a Luddite, either. I love that we have these laptops and tablets and smart phones; they're awesome and convenient and all that. It's more about maintaining balance. Technology should always be a predicate of the true subject: our individual humanity, our examined lives." ~ Paul Harding
17. "The fictional world seems larger, seems to have more dimension and richness when, for example, the protagonist from one novel you've read has a cameo role in another. I think that recognition is a very, very powerful phenomenon; it is one of the deepest and greatest pleasures of reading." ~ Paul Harding
18. "The silver lining of those years when I was trying to get 'Tinkers' published but couldn't were the years when I had to decide, Why do I want to be a writer? I realized that writing is the thing itself; writing is not a means to publication, writing is not a predicate of publication, so I spent years making art for art's sake." ~ Paul Harding
19. "I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant—step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word." ~ Paul Harding
20. "What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other." ~ Paul Harding
21. "And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it." ~ Paul Harding
22. "When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart." ~ Paul Harding

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Paul Harding Quotes
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Today's Quote

I love this constant motion between ' Solitude' and ' Loneliness '. On one end it's the desire and achievement of being alone ( glorious) on the other it's the utter despair and pain of being alone.."
Author: Anubhav Mishra

What Did Paul Harding Talk About?

Thin
Ear
Con
Hen
Self
Hear
Heart
She
Per
Pen
Hum
Act
Thou
Cat
Use
Read
Though
True
Tan
Round
Tell
Test
Ring
Seem
Published
Cause
Each
Hang
Here
Hey
Itself
King
Light
Lit
Off
Once
Ought
Place
Wit

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