"In American Romances, her new book of essays, Rebecca Brown has a voice that is full of pop references, family stories, and the fruits of a lifetime of -- in her perfect phrase - extreme reading. The voice is a hoot, and it is dead serious. This is writing with exquisite control, fully up to the task Brown takes on of playing a fierce game of beach ball with deep problems of American (and personal) history and identity."

-- Susan Stinson

#Beach Quotes #Book Quotes #Reading Quotes

“the sad end he met in Afghanistan was more accurately a function of his stubborn idealism--his insistence on trying to do the right thing. In which case it wasn't a tragic flaw that brought Tillman down, but a tragic virtue.”
“This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's laws?”
“There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That wordÂ—tensionÂ—has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other endÂ—is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be?”
“I've found from years of trial that the only way I can work is to make sketches in pencil from Nature, purely as reference material for future use in the studio.”
“Marriage can wait, education cannot.”
“The first job of the historian and of the journalist is to find facts. Not the only job, perhaps not the most important, but the first. Facts are the cobblestones from which we build roads of analysis, mosaic tiles that we fit together to compose pictures of past and present. There will be disagreement about where the road leads and what reality or truth is revealed by the mosaic picture. The facts themselves must be checked against all the available evidence. But some are round and hard--and the most powerful leaders in the world can trip over them. So can writers, dissidents and saints.”
“I'm happy. Which often looks like crazy.”

Source : David Henry Hwang (1993). “M. Butterfly: With an Afterword by the Playwright”, p.54, Penguin
“I guess voice acting is just fun, interesting to say...but it is.”

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