“The great thing about writing is that you can do all these antisocial things and you get paid for them and nobody ever arrests you because they're all make-believe. Then that way if you were actually ever driven to do any of those things, the pressure's off because you'd have already written them down. It's therapy.”
—Stephen King
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“If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.”
—Buddha
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“First sentences are doors to worlds.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin
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“Writing that springs from the surface of existence—when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up—is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake.
"That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.”
—Franz Kafka
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“Ideas are easy. It’s the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats. I read newspapers, textbooks on crime. I talk to private investigators, police officers, jail administrators, doctors, lawyers, career criminals. Ideas are everywhere.”
—Sue Grafton
The following is the exact text of the spoken speech, transcribed from recordings:
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.
But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.
In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.
I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Our compassionate and thorough manuscript edit and critique will give your prose the polish it needs to shine above the others. We offer a detailed line edit, content edit, overview critique, and unlimited follow-up conversations. http://www.inspirationforwriters.com/editing/services.html Free sample edit of the first 500 words of your book-length work.
“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”—James Joyce
“The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.”—William Faulkner
“To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of a subject - of endless trying to dig out of the essential truth, the essential justice.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I take the reporting side of writing more seriously than the writing side. I think it really is a lot of work to get things right, so I trained myself. I sort of take notes the way photographers take photos. You just sort of scattershot, record everything, because you never know what's going to prove invaluable...”—Jon Krakauer
“What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.”—Edward Dahlberg
“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success—but only if you persist.”—Isaac Asimov
“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's works is all I can permit myself to contemplate.”—John Steinbeck
“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.”—Richard Harding Davis
“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”—Jack London
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”—Rudyard Kipling
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”—from the movie “Dead Poets Society”
“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a painting that speaks.”—Simonides
“Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.”—Jean-Paul Sartre
“Poetry is subconscious conversation; it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it.”—Sonia Sanchez
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.”—Allen Ginsberg
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.”—Paul Dirac
“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”—Plato
“Poetry is not sought but received. The puritan habits of hard work are not much help. Oh, they may help you get in the chair, keep you at the task, but the real lure is the gift of the word, the line that surprises.”—Donald M. Murray
“The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or ‘with the flower of the mind’... not with the intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated with nectar.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense, the writing will create the mood...I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing seemed worth enduring for another five minutes...and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”—Joyce Carol Oates
“Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.”—Albert Camus
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”—Scott Adams
“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your inspiration with others.”—Robert Louis Stevenson
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.”—Cyril Connolly
“Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.”—Bonnie Friedman
“Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.”—John Gardner
“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Learning to write may be a part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes from a superior devotion to reading.”—Eudora Welty
“Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.”—T.S. Eliot
Our compassionate and thorough manuscript edit and critique will give your prose the polish it needs to shine above the others. We offer a detailed line edit, content edit, overview critique, and unlimited follow-up conversations.
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Free sample edit of the first 500 words of your book-length work.
“Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.”—Robert Frost
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”—Emily Dickinson
“Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.”—Sigmund Freud
“The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.”—Thomas Hardy
“Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.”—Plato “There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either.”—Robert Graves
“Poetry should be like fireworks, packed carefully and artfully, ready to explode with unpredictable effects."—Lilian Moore
“Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals.”—Sylvia Plath “A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.”—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.”—Kahlil Gibran
“It is not enough merely to love literature, if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possibility of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.”—Harlan Ellison
“If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.”—Kingsley Amis
“In good writing, words become one with things.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”—Robert Frost
“Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.”—Paul Theroux
“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”—T. S. Eliot
“Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.”—Jules Feifer
“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”—E. M. Forster
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug.”—Mark Twain
I am in charge of my own writing destiny. I know that if I work hard at the craft, put in the necessary hours, that I will succeed in reaching my dreams as a writer.
Creativity flows through me so easily, so effortlessly, so endlessly, that it makes me giggle sometimes.
I cannot only see stories in my head, but I can see them being written and being published in beautiful layouts.
I never talk about writer’s block or any such negative things. All is nothing but utter silliness, unnecessary man-made distractions. Instead, I talk about loving the adventure of the process, even if the terrain occasionally gets a little scary.
I am a talented writer. I know this. I know this without bravado or ego or self-delusion. But I do know this.
“The poet doesn't invent. He listens.”—Jean Cocteau
“The poet ... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.”—Lionel Trilling
“By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.”—Rita Dove “Poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest specific gravity in the most effective and externally inevitable sequence.”—Joseph Brodsky
“A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.”—Salman Rushdie
“Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.”—Edgar Allan Poe
“The joy of poetry is that it will wait for you. Novels don't wait for you. Characters change. But poetry will wait.”—Sonia Sanchez
“Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.”—Christopher Fry
“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”—Randall Jarell
“When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.”—Niels Bohr
"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"
"The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within."
"It may be long before the law of love will be recognized in international affairs. The machineries of government stand between and hide the hearts of one people from those of another."
"As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance, cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side."
"There is more to life than simply increasing its speed."
"We must be the change we wish to see."
"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."
"The moment there is suspicion about a person's motives, everything he does becomes tainted."
"Suffering cheerfully endured, ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy."
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