She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.
Interpretation
The quote illustrates the beauty and sensory experience of being surrounded by books and literature.
In this evocative imagery, Joe Hill captures the profound sensory relationship one can have with literature, where the smell of books transcends mere pages and ink, resembling the delightful aroma of a sweet dessert. This metaphor reflects the joy and richness that literature brings to life, making it not just a source of knowledge but a pleasurable and enriching experience.
In practice
In a book club meeting, to express the joy of reading.
The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads to let the demons out. To relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples. Punishing evidence of life.
I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.
It was something... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.
What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
That strain again! It had a dying fall: _x000D_ _x000D_ O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound _x000D_ _x000D_ That breathes upon a bank of violets, _x000D_ _x000D_ Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more: _x000D_ _x000D_ 'Tis not so sweet as it was before.
My elaboration of the story always conforms to the reality at its source. It is always close to the world, the life, the reality it describes. No matter where I go, I’m still holding up a mirror.
I try to turn a place on film into a mental state. I always have three or four locations that I repeat and return to in a film, to make it more mythic. But my fiction films are relatively subjective stories, experienced though one character. And that always justifies a little stylisation in terms of landscape.
As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.
You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
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