Kyle Minor famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Question of "Where We Begin" turns to be not only a formal question but also a question central to the attempt to make sense of things about which it is very difficult to make any sense - illness, death, despair, suicides, cruelty, the various troubles love can provoke, our inability to really know one another when we our inner selves are walled off by our bodies.
-- Kyle Minor

#Suicide #Self #Despair
If you start parsing the cause-and-effect chain backward through time, eventually you land in cosmology - does the story begin with the Big Bang or the out-of-nothing creation of the world by the word of a Southern Baptist god? And that question is even more fraught than any of the others. The stakes couldn't be any higher, because not it's not just a question of life and death, but also a question of life after death or eternal torture after death.
-- Kyle Minor

#Land #Life And Death #Southern
You can't know how weird your own life is until you get some distance on it. Everything seems mundane or boring or embarrassingly small.
-- Kyle Minor

#Distance #Life Is #Boring
One of the most useful parts of my education as a writer was the practice of reading a writer straight through - every book the writer published, in chronological order, to see how the writer changed over time, and to see how the writer's idea of his or her project changed over time, and to see all the writer tried and accomplished or failed to accomplish.
-- Kyle Minor

#Book #Reading #Order
Everything is possible for the writer. There isn't anything anyone can tell you that you can't do, and there is no such thing as "getting away with" anything. There's no one to tell you what you can or can't do. You're only limited by the fences you allow yourself to build around yourself, for whatever reason, including fidelity to some idea about literature someone else imposed upon you some time long ago or five minutes ago.
-- Kyle Minor

#Ideas #Long #Literature
There are as many kinds of missionaries as there are human beings. There are the terrible, colonialist power-grabbers, still, and there are plenty of the sort of well-intentioned villains who do great harm and don't understand that they are doing great harm.
-- Kyle Minor

#Kind #Being There #Villain
Preacher who says that the sweet life is made from bitter parts is more or less telling those who have come to mourn the teenage suicide that this is just one bitter ingredient in the sweet thing foreordained by the benevolent god. To which I want to shake my fist and say: There is not one sweet thing about it. It is only bitter.
-- Kyle Minor

#Suicide #Sweet #Teenage
Mistakes were made long ago. It is someone else's fault. We can't be held responsible, but we are very sorry.
-- Kyle Minor

#Sorry #Mistake #Long Ago

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to deathâ€”and I refuse suicide.
I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.
I don't recall having any self-awareness about the intricacy of my stories.
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.
Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.
The guys who stick around are the smartest guys and the guys who are the most self-driven. You have to have drive. The coaches can only take you so far. You have to want to learn and work.
Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.
Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery:

Kyle Minor famous quotes

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