Words&Dirt

“When we turn to the art of being most fully human, disclosure in our relationships is what makes this family and this community meaningful, or said more dynamically, is what makes these radically embedded relationships a situated case of ‘meaning making.’  Any understanding of harmony that demands conformity at the expense of a disclosing particularity in so doing sets limits on the possibility of attaining wisdom, and is for this reason, quite literally, life-threatening.”

––Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, by Roger T. Ames, pg. 12

“The work of a storyteller doesn’t get any easier the more experience we get, because once we’ve learned how to do something, we can’t get excited about doing exactly the same thing again––or at least most of us can’t.  We keep wanting to reach for the story that is too hard for us to tell––and then make ourselves learn how to tell it.  If we succeed, then maybe we can write better and better books, or at least more challenging ones, or at the very least we won’t bore ourselves.

The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I’ll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that I’m just plain not talented or skilled enough to write.  That’s the dilemma every storyteller faces.  It is painful to fail.  But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try.”

––Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card, pg. xxi