Rivka Galchen famous quotes

The writing process for a short story feels more like field geology, where you keep turning the thing over and over, noting its qualities in detail, hammering at it, putting it near flame, pouring different acids on it, and then finally you figure out what it is, or you just give up and mount it on a ring and have an awkward chunky piece of jewelry that seems weirdly dominating but that you for some reason like. I could be wrong about field geology here.
-- Rivka Galchen

#Giving Up #Writing #Flames

Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.
-- Rivka Galchen

#Ideas #Physics #Accepting

But one day I woke up and heard myself saying, I am a fork being used to eat cereal. I am not a spoon. I am a fork. And I can’t help people eat cereal any longer.
-- Rivka Galchen

#Cereal #People #One Day

I've always thought of my own mind as an unruly parliament, with a feeble leader, with crazy extremist factions.
-- Rivka Galchen

#Crazy #Leader #Mind

We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in-a way to signal those lies that could more accurately be understood as dreams.
-- Rivka Galchen

#Dream #Liars #Lying

The magnificently humble. The enormously small. The meaningfully ridiculous. Robert Walser's work often reads like a dazzling answer to the question, How immense can modesty be?
-- Rivka Galchen

#Humble #Answers #Ridiculous

Give up identification with this mass of flesh as well as with what thinks it a mass. Both are intellectual imaginations. Recognise your true self as undifferentiated awareness, unaffected by time, past, present or future, and enter Peace.

What if you let go of every bit of control and every urge that you have, right down to the most infinitesimal urge to control anything, anywhere, including anything that may be happening with you at this moment? If you were able to give up control absolutely, totally, and completely, then you would be a spiritually free being.

Don't just give up, Hachiko. Life is about getting knocked down over and over, but still getting up each time. If you keep getting up, you win.

I can write better than anyone who can write faster,

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.

We will not capitulate - no, never! We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us - a world in flames.

There is, then, no danger in the circumstances that anti-semitism will disappear, for it is the Jews themselves who add fuel to its flames and see that it is kept well stoked. Before the opposition to it can disappear, the malady itself must disappear. And from that point of view, you can rely on the Jews: as long as they survive, anti-semitism will never fade. (13th February 1945)

The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. He might get burned, but he's in the game. And once he's in, he can't go back, he'll Beat his wings 'til he burns them black... No, The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. . . The Moth don't care if The Flame is real, 'Cause Flame and Moth got a sweetheart deal. And nothing fuels a good flirtation, Like Need and Anger and Desperation... No, The Moth don't care if The Flame is real. . .

It is a war built on lies that has fanned the flames of international terrorism

If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason.