A Burnable Book
by Bruce Holsinger
(Harper-Collins, 2014)
If you could build your own life around the secret lives of others, if you erect your house on the corrupt foundations of theirs, you soon come to regard all useful knowledge as your due.
Page 7.
To write a great poem … you have to be a greater liar. You must convince your readers that your characters are flesh and blood rather than words on dead skin, that their loves and hatreds and passions are as deep and present as the readers’ own.
Page 136.
He stood still as a carved apostle.
Page 138.
He started weeping, not the cry of a man with an eye to his status, nor a boyish mewl, but a ripping keen, the phlegm pouring form his nose to glisten his lips and chin, his chest and shoulders heaving in a haphazard rhythm, animal-like chokes barking form his throat. In a strange way I found myself feeling almost jealous of his pain, its comfortless depth.
Page 144.
Regret paints the memory in infinite hues, all blurring to a leaden grey with the passing of time.
Page 166.
The power of the teller is inestimable.
Page 178.
The best stories are those that force us to ask the most difficult questions of ourselves.
Page 290.
Readers will believe anything they are told to believe.
Page 338.
Confusion isn’t a sin. What matters most is love.
Page 426.
Old age is relative. It’s writing that keeps you young.
Page 427.
Fasting clears the head like nothing else.
Page 428.
We live in an immense world, whole universes of taste and touch and scent, of voices commingling in the light, and dy8ng away with the common dread that strands at every man’s door. Yet we perceive and remember this world only as it creates those single fragments of experience: moments of everyday kindness, or self-sacrificing love, or unthinkable brutality.
Page 463.