Words to Live By: Writing & Storytelling Edition

Presented without comment, here is a collection of quotes on the topic of writing and storytelling. 


I'm pleased to say that all of these quotes are from books I have read/am currently reading!

If you don’t like the rules of the world you live in, sometimes you have to break them, and fantasy fiction - alternative universes, utopias and dystopias, science fiction, steampunk, paranormal stories, sword and sorcery epics and the rest - breaks the rules of everyday life. It can be freeing. It can make you feel nothing is sacred, anything can happen, everything can change.
Samantha Ellis


[...] Sometimes this goes poorly, because the world of Disney is not often the world the rest of us live in, and girls need to learn virtues other than vague spunk, and boys need to learn a role other than privileged rogue.
Catherynne M. Valente


A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.
Gloria Steinem




Writing sharpens life; life enriches writing. Ironically enough, I write best when I am happy, because I then have that saving sense of objectivity which is humour and artistic perspective. When I am sad, it becomes a one-dimensional diary. So a full, rich life is essential.
Sylvia Plath


How that act will be done, the expansion, will be different every time. Traveling around the world or quiet study or political engagement, it doesn’t matter. It gives the genii temporarily inhabiting your body something new to do. And not to expand is to insult the muses. To believe you are the creator of your own world is to dishonour the divine. When you believe that you are in charge, that you are not in a collaboration every time you sit alone at your desk, it’s no wonder what comes from your pen is so earthbound and weighty. No wonder the muses turn up their noses.
Jessa Crispin




[...] Too often in books like this, (especially in the classics of the genre) girls are acted upon, rather than actors, their choices are few, reflecting the real world, where a girl’s power is often located purely in her ability to say no: to suitors, to her social inferiors, even to herself. I wanted my girl to choose, to find power in saying yes, to make her own story - and of course her own ship.
Catherynne M. Valente



A version of this was originally posted on my LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/words-live-emily-yakashiro

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