Quotes Writing Prompt (July 2020)

For you know that I myself am a labyrinth, where one easily gets lost.
– Charles Perrault

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
– Matsuo Bashō

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
– Jack London

Secrets had an immense attraction to him, because he never could keep one, and he enjoyed the sort of unhallowed thrill he experienced when he went and told another animal, after having faithfully promised not to.
– Kenneth Grahame

A lot of novelists start late—Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you’re young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can’t be taught.
– James Mallahan Cain

May I be an isle for those who yearn for land, A lamp for those who long for light; For all who need a resting place, a bed; For those who need a servant, may I be their slave.
– Śāntideva

Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.
– Robert Burton

Say, when shall we next meet together? Surely not in cloudy weather (…)
– Li Po

Alone from contact, alone I sit / Unlimited commoners do not know me.
– Lü Dongbin

I spend my life in examining things: I write down in the evening whatever I have remarked, what I have seen, and what I have heard in the day: every thing engages my attention, and every thing excites my wonder: I am like an infant, whose organs, as yet tender, are strongly affected by the slightest objects.
– Montesquieu

Observe things as they are and don’t pay attention to other people. There are some people just like mad dogs barking at everything that moves, even barking when the wind stirs among the grass and leaves.
– Huang Po

Featured Image by Ellen Melin

For more writing prompts, visit my blog. Feel free to send me a link to what you’ve written/created if any of these prompts inspire you. I’d love to read/see them!

Link to my literature blog here. 

Like Literature

A study on how the word “like” is used in literature.

I thought it would be interesting to look back at my favourite books and learn how different authors utilise analogy/simile in their work.

This is a series I just started in my literature blog. I’ll be posting new compilations there every Sunday. If anyone would like to follow that, here’s a link. That said, this is the second part of my first post on this series because there were more beautiful quotes from Sputnik Sweetheart that I wasn’t able to add there, but wanted to keep in my collection, for inspiration.

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

1. For a moment an agreeable aftertaste remained, but after a few seconds this disappeared, like morning dew on a summer leaf.
2. It’s not just that I can’t write. What really upsets me is I don’t have confidence any more in the act of writing itself. I read the stuff I wrote not long ago, and it’s boring. What could I have been thinking? It’s like looking across the room at some filthy socks tossed on the floor. I feel awful, realizing all the time and energy I wasted.
3. Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.
4. Miu popped an olive into her mouth, grasped the pit with her fingers and, like a poet getting the punctuation just right, gracefully discarded it in an ashtray.
5. “Sumire has disappeared.”
   “Disappeared?”
   “Like smoke,”
6. Miu gave a sigh like the wind at the edge of the world.
7. (…) this gap existed inside me—like a silent snake in the grass.
8. I’ve had the same type of dream many times. The details differ, including the setting, but they all follow the same pattern. And the pain I feel upon waking is always the same. A single theme is repeated there over and over, like a train blowing its whistle at the same blind curve night after night.
9. I was awakened by music. Far-off music, barely audible. Steadily, like a faceless sailor hauling in an anchor from the bottom of the sea, the faint sound brought me to my senses.
10. Her eyes were deep and clear, like the twilit darkness on the day we met.
11. A feeling came over me, like a thousand strings were tugging at me. Perhaps not fullblown romantic love, but something very close.
12. Like you’re on a train at night travelling across some vast plain, and you catch a glimpse of a tiny light in the window of a farmhouse. In an instant it’s sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just barely, for a few moments.

Featured Image by Steve Halama

For more writing prompts, visit my blog. Feel free to send me a link to what you’ve written/created if any of these prompts inspire you. I’d love to read/see them!

Link to my literature blog here.

Writing Prompt: Passion

A collection of paintings & quotes about love, passion, and understanding.

1. “One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters… But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.” –Charles Baudelaire (Photo: Garden at Sainte-Adresse by Monet)
2. “My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.” –Edith Sitwell (Photo: Boreas by John Waterhouse)
3. “What have you to do with hearts, except for dissection?” –Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Photo: The Soul of the Rose by John Waterhouse)
4. “To love someone means to see them as God intended them.” –Fyodor Dostoevsky (Photo: The Lovers by Rene Magritte)
5. “I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything but catch nothing except wind.” –Michel de Montaigne (Photo: Petite Bèrgere by William Bouguereau)

This will be the last post on my digital edits for now. I hope you all enjoyed this series as much as I did going down memory lane. Let me know what writing prompts you would prefer to see on this blog (quotes/literature, more visual-based etc.) and I’ll try to post more of those.

Featured Image by Elijah O’Donnell

For more writing prompts, visit my blog. Feel free to send me a link to what you’ve written/created if any of these prompts inspire you. I’d love to read/see them!

Link to my literature blog here. 

Writing Prompt: Painting

A collection of my favourite paintings and quotes on happiness, nature, and love.

1. “I say let the world go to hell but I should always have my tea.” –Fyodor Dostoevsky (Photo: A Gray Day by Richard Edward Miller)
2. “Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands but let it go and you learn at once how big and precious it is.” –Maxim Gorky (Photo: The Kiss by Klimt)
3. “Nature creates while destroying, and doesn’t care whether it creates or destroys as long as life isn’t extinguished, as long as death doesn’t lose its rights.” –Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Photo: Genesis by Charles Burchfield)
4. “To love for the sake of being loved is human but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.” –Alphonse de Lamartine (Photo: The Promenade by Marc Chagall)
5. “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” –Gustave Flaubert (Photo: The Gray Tree by Piet Mondrian)
6. “The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.” –Ray Bradbury (Photo: Young Girl Reading by Jean-Honoré Fragonard)

More digital edits I found in my files. These are from the most recent batch from last year and the final ones I made. Sifting through these, I remember attempting to “consume” as much art as I could, thinking that maybe by doing so, my passion for writing would return to me. But it didn’t. I’ve been having the worst writer’s block in the last five years with bursts of creativity few and far between. My passion for writing from when I was around 13-16 is gone. Those years feel more like a dream now than a memory.

Featured Image by Evie Shaffer

For more writing prompts, visit my blog. Feel free to send me a link to what you’ve written/created if any of these prompts inspire you. I’d love to read/see them!

Link to my writing/literature blog here. 

Writing Prompt: Nature

A collection of literature and paintings with the theme: nature

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1. “Do not swear by the moon, for she changes constantly. Then your love would also change.” Shakespeare (photo)
2. “Have you not noticed that the wild flowers are becoming scarcer every year? It may be that their wise men have told them to depart ‘til man becomes more human. Perhaps they have migrated to heaven.” Kakuzō Okakura (photo)
3. “The world doesn’t understand me and I don’t understand the world, that’s why I’ve withdrawn from it.” Paul Cézanne (photo)
4. “Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.” John Keats (photo)
5. “I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” John Keats (photo)

Featured Image by Kristine Cinate

For more writing prompts, visit my blog. Send me a link to what you’ve written/created if any of these prompts inspire you. I’d love to read/see them!

Link to my writing blog here.

Writing Prompt: Film

A collection of film stills and quotes, for inspiration

1. “It’s funny how when you were a kid, a day could last forever. Then you grow up and all these years just seemed like a blink.” Stephen King (photo from the film, The Light Between Oceans)
2. “I started making plans thinking we would get that far.” Daniel Handler (photo from the film, Requiem for a Dream)
3. “As it has been said: A love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.” Anne Sexton (photo from the film, Me Before You)
4. “We know god is dead. But listening to you, I wasn’t so sure.” Charles Bukowski (photo from the film, Beginners)
5. “When you’re young, you’re so self-reliant. You don’t even need much religion.” Sylvia Plath (photo based on the film, Amélie)
6. “And you see I’ve been held back by the darkness in my mind. And I see that I’ll never win the war against time.” Wildes (photo from the film, A Very Long Engagement)

Continuing on from my previous post, I’ve put together some digital edits I made years ago. When people ask me what my favourite film is, my response always seems to be Amélie. I have rewatched this film more times than I can remember. What is your favourite film?

Featured Image by Les Anderson

For more writing prompts, visit my blog. Feel free to send me a link to what you’ve written/created if any of these prompts inspire you. I’d love to read/see them!

Link to my writing blog here. 

Writing Prompt: Introvert

Here’s a collection of photos and quotes with the theme: Introversion.

1. “I was quiet but I was not blind.” Jane Austin (photo by Paul Apal’kin)
2. “Curiosity is the lust of the mind.” Thomas Hobbes (photo by Rachel Baran)
3. “If you’re old, don’t try to change yourself, change your environment.”
   B.F. Skinner (photo by Paul Apal’kin)
4. “It is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.”
   Wallace Stegner (photo: Melanie Laurent)
5. “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived fully as those we spent with a favorite book.” Marcel Proust (photo)
6. “I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.” Arthur Rimbaud (photo)

I have recently come across these digital edits in my files and thought I would store/share them here. This used to be such a cathartic little hobby of mine, combining my favourite literature with modern photography or classical paintings. Maybe I might start doing this again.

Featured Image by Matthew Henry

For more writing prompts, visit my blog. Send me a link to what you’ve written/created if any of these prompts inspire you. I’d love to read/see them!

Link to my writing blog here.

50 Quotes Writing Prompt

There is always something to be learned from reading, whether the literary piece was written a hundred years ago or last Wednesday. Thus, I have compiled a list of my favourite quotes by classical and contemporary writers for inspiration.

1. “I think it’s important to realize you can miss something but not want it back.” — Paulo Coelho
2. “One day Bird had approached his father with this question; he was six years old: Father, where was I a hundred years before I was born? Where will I be a hundred years after I die? Father, what will happen to me when I die? Without a word, his young father had punched him in the mouth, broke two of his teeth and bloodied his face, and Bird forgot the fear of death.” — Kenzaburō Ōe
3. “Between my finger and my thumb. The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.”
   — Seamus Heaney
4. “The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.” — Elias Canetti
5. “I wanted love to grow back, like the grass when it’s mowed down. To grow differently, if need be, like children’s teeth, like hair, like fingernails. To spring up at will, wild and untended.” — Herta Müller
6. “What is honor compared to a woman’s love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms . . . or the memory of a brother’s smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.”
   — George R.R. Martin
7. “I was afraid of being afraid. I wounded the silence. The vast spaces sharpened my grief.” — Violette Leduc
8. “With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand…hopeless from the start.” — Sylvia Plath
9. “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” — Jane Austen
10. “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
    — Italo Calvino
11. “Our imagination flies – we are its shadow on the earth.”
    — Vladimir Nabokov
12. “I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted.”
    — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
13. “The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worst one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there.” — Stephen King
14. “Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.” — Horace Mann
15. “Only one solution presented itself. I went from chemist to chemist buying packets of paracetamol. I bought only a few packets at a time to avoid arousing suspicion – but I needn’t have worried. No one paid me the least attention; I was clearly as invisible as I felt. It was cold in my room, and my fingers were numb and clumsy as I tore open the packets. It took an immense effort to swallow all the tablets. But I forced them all down, pill after bitter pill. Then I crawled onto my uncomfortable narrow bed. I shut my eyes and waited for death. But death didn’t come. Instead a searing, gut-wrenching pain tore through my insides. I doubled up and vomited, throwing up bile and half-digested pills all over myself. I lay in the dark, a fire burning in my stomach for what seemed like eternity. And then, slowly, in the darkness, I realized something.  I didn’t want to die. Not yet; not when I  hadn’t lived. This gave me a kind of hope, however murky and ill defined. It propelled me at any rate to acknowledge that I couldn’t do this alone. I needed help.” — Alex Michaelides
16. “Though I am not naturally honest, I am sometimes so by chance.”
    — William Shakespeare
17. “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” — Joseph Brodsky
18. “I’ve been very near death. And you can’t imagine the wild elation of those moments – it’s the sudden glimpse of the absurdity of life that brings it – when one meets death face to face.” — André Malraux
19. “Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes.” — Ella Wheeler Wilcox
20. “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” — James Baldwin
21. “What a frightful weapon is human thought! It is our defense and our safeguard, the most precious gift that God has made us. It is ours and it obeys us; we may launch it forth into space, but, once outside of our feeble brains, it is gone; we can no longer control it.” — Alfred De Musset
22. “Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain, we obey.” — Marcel Proust
23. “We hear every day of murders committed in the country. Brutal and treacherous murders; slow, protracted agonies from poisons administered by some kindred hand; sudden and violent deaths by cruel blows, inflicted with a stake cut from some spreading oak, whose every shadow promised—peace. In the county of which I write, I have been shown a meadow in which, on a quiet summer Sunday evening, a young farmer murdered the girl who had loved and trusted him; and yet, even now, with the stain of that foul deed upon it, the aspect of the spot is—peace.”
    — Mary Elizabeth Braddon
24. “They were dreamers—and they dreamt themselves into the cemetery.”
    — Mary Elizabeth Braddon
25. “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
    — Alan Wilson Watts
26. “If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.” — Derek Walcott
27. “The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.”
    — William Golding
28. “Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.” — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
29. “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” — Michel Foucault
30. “Stop thinking, and end your problems. What difference between yes and no? What difference between success and failure? Must you value what others value, avoid what others avoid? How ridiculous! Other people are excited, as though they were at a parade. I alone don’t care, I alone am expressionless, like an infant before it can smile. Other people have what they need; I alone possess nothing. I alone drift about, like someone without a home. I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty. Other people are bright; I alone am dark. Other people are sharp; I alone am dull. Other people have purpose; I alone don’t know. I drift like a wave on the ocean, I blow as aimless as the wind.” — Lao-Tzu
31. “Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.” — David Hume
32. “I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
33. “There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
34. “It is only practice that improves our minds as well as bodies, and we must expect nothing from our understandings any farther than they are perfected by habits.” — John Locke
35. “The cliché that sea dry up and rocks rot away, but the heart never changes is nothing but a beautiful fantasy.” — Mo Yan
36. “Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world’s sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way.” — Herta Müller
37. “If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.”
    — Naguib Mahfouz
38. “We struck up a conversation, taking pains at first to give it an easy flow and sticking to the most frivolous topics. Did he, I asked, believe in predestination? He did. Did he believe that all men were doomed to die? Yes, he felt certain that all men would absolutely have to die, but he was less sure that all men had to be born.”
    — Günter Wilhelm Grass
39. “Life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.”
    — Molière
40. “Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go.”
    — Jean de La Fontaine
41. “We’ll leave now, so that this moment will remain a perfect memory…let it be our song and think of me every time you hear it.” — Betty Smith
42. “There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time.”
    — Milan Kundera
43. “There is a maxim that death is the number two fear that people have and public speaking is the first.” — Sidney Sheldon
44. “Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.”
    — Dean Koontz
45. “When I listen to this music I feel like I’m in a wide-open, empty place. It’s a vast space, with nothing to close it off. No walls, no ceiling. I don’t need to think, don’t need to say anything. Just being there is enough. I close my eyes and give myself up to the beautiful strings. There’s no headaches, no sensitivity to cold, no periods, or ovulation. Everything is simply beautiful, peaceful, flowing. I can just be.”
    — Haruki Murakami
46. “I never again shall tell you what I think. I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly.” — Edna St. Vincent Millay
47. “I thought surely you’d built a new life, with no room in it for me. I’d hoped that (…) My life is nothing but room for you. It could never be filled by anyone but you.” — Kurt Vonnegut
48. “I feel like I am floating in plasma I need a teacher or a lover I need someone to risk being involved with me. I am so vain and I am so masochistic. How can they coexist?” — Francesca Woodman
49. “Some cry with tears; others with thoughts.” — Octavio Paz
50. “I think spring is inside me. I feel spring awakening, I feel it in my entire body and soul. I have to force myself to act normally. I’m in a state of utter confusion, don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do. I only know that I’m longing for something.” — Anne Frank

Featured Image by S O C I A L . C U T

For more writing prompts, visit my blog. Send me a link to what you’ve written/created if any of these prompts inspire you. I’d love to read/see them!

Link to my writing blog here.

Picture Writing Prompt #2

Another collection of some of my favourite contemporary art. For inspiration. Links to the artists’ page in the captions.

instagram.com/alejogiraldo_

instagram.com/alejogiraldo_

instagram.com/alejogiraldo_

instagram.com/alejogiraldo_

instagram.com/markryden

instagram.com/adamelmahjoub

instagram.com/randahaddadin

ishaalobo.tumblr.com

mayleeillustration.tumblr.com

Featured Image by Ioana Cristiana

Here’s part 1 of my picture writing prompt. For more, visit my blog. Send me a link to what you’ve written/created if any of these prompts inspire you. I’d love to read/see them!

Link to my writing blog here.

Quotes Writing Prompt (May 2020)

I shut my eyes, say the word, and I’m back in Italy, so many years ago, walking down the tree-lined driveway, watching him step out of the car, billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, sunglasses, straw hat, skin everywhere. Suddenly he’s shaking my hand, handing me his backpack, removing his suitcase from the trunk of the cab, asking if my father is home.
– André Aciman, Call My By Your Name

Isn’t life strange? There are people who have so many leftover clothes, they can’t stuff them all in their wardrobe. And then there are people like me, whose socks never match.
– Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
– Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It And Other Stories

Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well. So please try not to hate me. I am a flawed human being – a far more flawed human being than you realize. Which is precisely why I do not want you to hate me. Because if you were to do that, I would really go to pieces. I can’t do what you can do: I can’t slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass. I don’t know for a fact that you are really like that, but sometimes you give me that impression.
– Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

And here comes the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is much safer to be feared than loved because love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
– Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

The books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit, where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.
– Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

Featured Image by Ksenia Makagonova

For more writing prompts, visit my blog. Send me a link to what you’ve written/created if any of these prompts inspire you. I’d love to read/see them!

Link to my writing blog here.