Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
Interpretation
Writers may offer profound insights but often struggle with their own lives.
This quote highlights the paradox of writers who can articulate wisdom and insights on life, yet may not embody or practice those insights in their personal lives. It suggests that despite the depth and clarity found in their writing, writers are often just as flawed and chaotic as anyone else, struggling with the same challenges and messiness of existence.
In practice
Use this quote during a literary discussion about the nature of creativity versus personal struggles.
The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.
Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.
Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
It's interesting because I think class is a heavy, heavy part of 'Moonlight,' and I think, in a certain way, through the sum of all these parts, it's become a commentary on the black experience in America.
Dark, dark! The horror of darkness, like a shroud, wraps me and bears me on through mist and cloud.
The trick. . .is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity, self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary.
I have heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so the ghosts of dead people, who are not easy in their graves, keep the day they died upon.
The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.
The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.
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