‘No Writer Can Standstill’
4 writing quotes from four women whose writing transformed the world
Writing is a place where the rubber of our lofty visions meets the badly-paved road of actually getting words on paper. For me, this process is messy, involves wrong turns and dead ends, and sometimes never leads anywhere.
But even so, millions of writers sit down every day to put their ideas to words, string them together in a coherent way, and maybe get close to what the lofty ideals of their imagination unkindly set for them. In sum, it’s about showing up and doing the work. As Isabel Allende puts it, “Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”
These four quotes from four different women who are among the best writers in the game have inspired me to show up day after day, and I hope they might do the same for you.
#1 Rachel Carson: ‘No writer can stand still’
In a now out of print book, The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work, we discover Carson’s unpublished papers collected by Paul Brooks, who worked as her editor-in-chief for The Edge of the Sea and, the colossal 20th-century environmental classic Silent Spring.
Writing, for Carson, was less about talent than sheer endurance. A marathon of…
