Lynne Sharon Schwartz Quotes

• 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

  Athlete, Self, Dancer

  FaceBook post by Lynne Sharon Schwartz from Oct 22, 2014

  47 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Meaning Of Life, Tasks

  FaceBook post by Lynne Sharon Schwartz from Jun 17, 2015

  5 Copy quote

• what I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow.

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Reading, Love Is, Eggs

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2011). “Leaving Brooklyn”, p.26, Hawthorne Books

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Way, Fiction

  6 Copy quote

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

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Book, Found, Censored

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2001). “Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books”, p.44, Beacon Press

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Girl, Important, Impossible

  6 Copy quote

• I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Book, Giving, Thrill

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2001). “Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books”, p.5, Beacon Press

  4 Copy quote

• Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played.

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Reading, Backdrop, Stable

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2001). “Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books”, p.12, Beacon Press

  6 Copy quote

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

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Book, People, Done

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2001). “Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books”, p.15, Beacon Press

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Demand, Dishes

  5 Copy quote

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

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Environment, Hell

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Opposites, Perfect, Bed

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2009). “Not Now, Voyager: A Memoir”, p.27, Counterpoint

  4 Copy quote

• My head aches, my eyes burn, my arms and legs have given up, and my face in the mirror has a grayish cast. The bed, across the room, calls in its unmistakable lover's croon, Come to me, come, only I can make you truly happy, oh, how happy I'll make you, don't resist, remember how you moan with pleasure the instant we touch..... Laura Acosta

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Eye, Mirrors, Bed

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2011). “Fatigue Artist”, p.83, Simon and Schuster

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Shipping, Printing

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2001). “Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books”, p.117, Beacon Press

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Song, Teacher, Air

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2011). “Fatigue Artist”, p.81, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

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