Tomorrow is the long day at the university, so don’t expect an entry until late tomorrow tonight.  A friend of mine sent me these quotations from The Secret Life of Bees. I thought I’d publish them.

“I didn’t know what to think, but what I felt was
magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered
my chest and filled it up.

“The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I
got one time when I walked back from the peach stand
and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon,
setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness
collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my
head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so
transparent I felt I could see through to something
pure inside them. My chest had ached then, too, this
very same way.”

“The world will give you that once in a while, a brief
time-out; the boxing bell rings and you go to your
corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up
life.”

“But the main thing is they (bees) are hardworking to
the point of killing themselves. Sometimes you want to
say to them, Relax, take some time off, you deserve
it.”

NORMAN MAILER

As I’m sure you heard, Norman Mailer died yesterday. A prolific writer, he also had much to say about topics related to writing and writers. I wanted to include in this post today a couple of quotations from his book, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing. I had read the book in 2003. I remember I bought the book after hearing Mailer interviewed about the book on NPR.

“Once you are committed to earning your living from your pen, you discover that you can push yourself.”

“It’s as difficult to become a professional writer as a professional athlete. It often depends on the ability to keep faith in yourself. One must be willing to take risks and try again.”

There are many more quotations from this great read I could have posted, but these underlined sentences caught my eye today.