Best 50 quotes of Chila Woychik on MyQuotes

A mist rises from a nearby mound. It could be me, that mist, or simply the caretaker’s mower-dust. If the breeze blows just right, I’ll ghost your solid, entwine your hair. Promise me you won’t shampoo, but carry me along, tiny dust-particles of me.

At least I could relate to Rose’s sense of adventure and Harriet Jones’ wacky determination and ingrained sense of responsibility. I can stomach the Tardis when my heroines are in place.

A writer hopes never to offend, but if he must, pray let him offend the gods before the reviewers.

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words pass from page to eye to brain. You know the feeling: you inhale, hold it, then slowly let it out, like one about to take down a bull moose with a Winchester .30-06. You force your mind to the task, scope out the area, take penetrating aim, and . . . read. But instead of dropping the quarry, you find you’ve become the hunted, the target. The projectile has somehow boomeranged and with its heat-sensing abilities (you have raised a sweat) darts straight towards you. Duck! And turn the page lest it drill between your eyes.

God, O God, where art thou? Thou art as distant to me as the lady combing rice in the Yunnan Province of China or a piece of floating space debris circling Pegasi. In this feeling-dead world of post traumatic stress, skepticism is king, queen, and court jester.

I am Frustration. I am Memory-Lost. Sometimes I read a line a dozen times before it sticks. My creative force has slipped. I type slower, speak slower, think at a snail’s pace. I’m Life shapeshifted by Post Traumatic Stress, bastardized by Fate.

I continue to live inside a dichotomy: what was and what shall be. The pain in my skull is me trying to mesh the two.

I die with the dying light, yet shine brighter as the darkness approaches. Soon I’ll be whittled to bone and stripped clean through, nothing left but a skeleton on which to hang a hat. But have no fear, I look good in hats.

I don’t need to write. Madness or suicide are other options, though not nearly as compelling. But I want to create; I hope to create worlds in my own image, admittedly a self-centered plan. I want others to understand me better, pay more attention to me, like or love me for who I am. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe I should simply learn to say, “Let’s have lunch.

If a book can save—redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane—surely, there must be a God.

I feign knowledge of writing: that I know something about it, that I should have learned something after all these years, that I might know something tomorrow. I read too much and write too little, or write too much and live too little. I have no classical education, no literary degree. I’m not specialized, Hugoed or geniusized; should I be writing at all? In this whole vast world, I’m a female peon sitting here at night wondering what it is I want to say. I aim for fluidity. But no, nix that line, that thought, this life. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? This life: it’s out of reach. I’m not sure what I’m saying anymore.

I have a bad habit of dropping verbal pellets to get a reaction, like Ursula LeGuin’s “A novelist’s business is lying” (that particular one got a lot of attention on Facebook), or, “Why is it that Christians hate the word ‘sex’?

I know more about Emily Bronte than anyone I know. I know enough about her family to have been a part. I’ve walked with her on her damp luscious lonely moors, watched her strain to write on miniscule scraps of paper, seen her hide her works from prying eyes. I’ve brooded alongside her and participated in her taciturnity. Before her death at the ripe old age of 30, I nursed her from the things that ultimately killed her: tuberculosis with a side order of Victorian thinking.

I’m a rat. I used to believe in the Golden Rule but now question it. It’s too easy to be snarky at those who are snarky toward me. I like how it feels—the yellow cheese giving way between pointed teeth. My tail begins to twitch.

I’m engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton’s A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it’s a stanza too short for my morphing existence. So I write my own.

I’m typing away, wondering why I had that Pepsi Throwback at such a late hour. Caffeine is a compulsion. Art is an obsession. Writing is both. It weaves in and out, this obsession, forming a basket, a basket I can hide in while pulling its lid over top; it shuts out the noise and normalcy of living. It shuts out the people and caffeinated relationships I love so well. Can you live with an artsy hermit? A sketchy-betchy, meditative, BabyBoomingPseudoHippie? Then short-term visits are in order.

I read a book, am vortexed in with no escape; my face contorts, eyelids frost, breath comes short, body longs, heart stop-starts. Who’s to say too much won’t kill me? Who’s to say I care?

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She’s clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I’m walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand. The actress has played her part well; she’s made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart? I fight hard to stay young—to keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young. I’m an actress playing a part. I’m afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don’t want to leave. It’s utterly selfish but I don’t care. After all, I’m no older than they—I’ve just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don’t retire nineteen-year-old actresses.

I should have been conceived during Woodstock; it’s in my blood: that burning desire to turn an absolute on its head and see what’s underneath. I’m as random as I can be and as responsible as I should be. Attempting to fuse the two makes for interesting days.

I suck the words word-dry to me, assimilated orderly at breakeye speed still hard and harder softer then line-lined book-dry ‘til not a drop of water-blood from oak and elm and authored men is left to whisper “Read…

I’ve had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

I’ve learned to lick my own foul wounds and prize the taste of ache.

I’ve never had a rat, never chased one. I chase my own tail and that’s enough. I must now make plans for the day I catch it.

I was a late bloomer. I was still naïve about what 16 year olds today have known for years. I remember sitting up and taking notice—of the world, my body, others—in a way never before experienced. I noticed boys, or rather they noticed me, at 16.

I wish I could say he was a French professor, a French chef, or even a bilingual tutor, but I can’t. He worked in a factory and spent his summer evenings at a reenactment village as a blacksmith or something equally masculine. But it didn’t really matter. He was the kind of man I had dreamt of, one who could bring a touch of the exotic to my small-town existence. (No doubt he would make love as passionately as he spoke French.)

Life is flinching in the midst of breathing, gasping at the thought of dying. It’s climbing ropeless up sheer rock faces, groping for the next finger-hole of hope. Steady on! Only a thousand feet to go and after that a jungle, a minefield, a rapids. (Can I stop smiling now?) Once, not long ago, I was flung off the cliff of the moment, thrust into an illicit relationship with destiny, an affair not of my making. Was I making love or being raped? The lines were fuzzy.

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who will love the smell of garbage and rummage through the bin of my failings to find the wrapped cheeseburger they can do without but consider long enough to get their taste buds used to the idea. Oh for a melodious tongue to sing me a song about french fries.

Only seconds slip by without me scrambling for the aid of someone better, more knowledgeable, to walk beside. Writers are good for that. They like nothing more than to tell you what they know. Dorothy Sayers, with all her essays and treatises, was good for that. Are women human? What constitutes the mind of the Maker? How did Dante survive the Inferno? Ask Dorothy; she’ll tell you and gladly.

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATH Conventions bleed my soul squeeze me old wear me grey like a headstone in transit. It’s tradition and form— fear of the unknown— driving me dead in tight spaces darkly. I cry aloud but who can hear when I stand alone in the middle of an art show….

Pulitzer is a word but accomplishment is an aura.

Split your skull—a hatchet works well enough. Take a more delicate instrument—a scalpel, perhaps—and make a hand-sized slit; it doesn’t matter where. Reach in (no glove needed), plunge down to the very bottom, pinch the inside layer of membrane and yank, hard. If it feels like you’ve just turned your brain inside out, you have. Writing is brain surgery, pure and simple.

sunset and evening star hunching and bending sleeping and slipping virus pneumonia coughing and crying hope in the small things heaven looks brighter aching and falling earth is still darkness slip into sleeping sleepings of death dead now and buried cold now and crumbling dust now and hope-filled heaven is hope (and loneliness lingers in those left behind)

Support our troops!” we cry, but I say, “Love our veterans!” And when he neglects church, take him cookies anyway. Sing him a song. Pet his cat.

Texting is a sex toy: pleasurable but a substitute for the real thing. Love has a face. Video chatting is good, but who’s comfortable enough to share their “bed hair”? Love isn’t about pat answers.

The no-booze rule is one of several shams perpetuated by certain religious groups, presumably to keep their flocks in line. After all, what’s a shepherd to do with drunk sheep? So take your medicine, but leave the booze on the shelf. We have a label to keep, and it’s not Jack Daniels. Don’t mourn for me. Just tell me what to do rather than teach me what to be. Slam another pill, pop that one last sedative…you’ll find me in the kitchen, washing my glass.

The number seven is magical, they say. Seven years ’til our cells completely regenerate. Seven years ’til Jacob possesses Rachel, no, Leah, and seven more for Rachel. Seven days in a week. Post traumatic stress often resolves itself in toto only after seven full years have passed. Such is the case for some brain trauma patients too. Seven. It’s a number worth remembering.

The Page awaits the Inspiration even as Inspiration roams the world of man, seeking a Page upon which to unfurl itself, body and soul, bare yet clothed in immortality if not immediacy. And the gods said, “Let there be a Page, and many a Page,” and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good.

The setting sun threatened to consume me—it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and walked away; I would live another day.

The tides wash up the Pearl of Great Price; I see it clearly. There it is: the secret so secret that even Indiana Jones has yet to discover it. But it’s mine. It’s a style pointer, a favorite agent, a best avenue for publication. It’s a sure-fire fire-starter, a league of extraordinary information. Shall we gather at the river and share? No. I found it. It’s mine!

The unrelenting grip of Soldier’s Syndrome slips finger by slow finger. The marrow’s been affected—emotional leukemia at the deepest level. Transplants of love and friendship aid healing, yet time is still key, and the clock never ticks fast enough. Eternity gains perspective when seconds feel like years. How long have I been gone? Six eternities and counting.

This world rubs me raw, scours me smooth like an SOS pad put to a grease-caked skillet. And pain: it stabs and scrapes and pulls me back to earth, my final B&B, that worm-spun cot of cool black sod.

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam’s cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

When reading a book, one hopes it doesn’t turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.

Without the hard we stay too soft, and heaven is reduced to myths like life. Theology aside, it’s plain to see that God forbids we get too comfortable.

Writing analogies are as abundant as ants at a picnic. We love nothing better than a good analogy, a “life-is-like-this” on the page. I breathe and out pops another analogy. As of this moment, I am sole owner of 1,643 analogies.

Writing is a beast to tame, an energy to transform. Whip that toad into a prince and French kiss it to life. We start at the top but keep looking down, from macro to micro, from what could work to what does—but start with the dream. Nothing is real apart from the clouds, and all clouds pass with life in their wake—some rain thoughts.

Writing is making love under a crescent moon: I see shadows of what’s to come, and it’s enough; I have faith in what I can’t see and it’s substantiated by a beginning, a climax, an ending. And if it’s an epic novel in hand, I watch the sunrise amid the twigs and dewing grass; the wordplay is what matters. Simply put, I’m in love, and any inconvenience is merely an afterthought. The sun tips the horizon; the manuscript is complete. The author, full of profound exhaustion, lays his stylus aside. His labor of love stretches before him, beautiful, content, sleeping, until the next crescent moon stars the evening sky.

Writing makes me hard, like a fisherman, and brown from the heat. Tossing out and reeling in is a job for visionaries and those with calloused hands.

You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty—done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.