E.J. Koh

I read this interview a while ago and I meant to blog about it then. I've read a few interviews and I always love how Koh expresses herself; whether I can relate to what she is saying or not, I find that she always words things so beautifully. Her liaison with language is so innate that it seems as though natural selection saw fit for her to weave words as her evolutionary contribution to humanity. Like she has no choice but to say things in an exquisite way. This is not to say that Koh is my favorite writer but simply that I don't think I've ever read or heard a sentence escape her that wasn't evidence of craftsmanship, even in conversation. Another quote from her I read that struck me (this is not from the interview I linked to above):

"My book editor called to ask why I must cut out a whole chapter. I’d cut several already. I wrote an amount I would never find again. I was proud of what I had wrought. I said, 'It’s too cheesy.'...Who can embrace a book that isn’t embraced by its own author? I wasn’t cutting words from a book. I was cutting out parts of me from myself. This was my violence. I had done this before—a missing chunk of my throat, a hole in my stomach. I had a pattern of a self-harm that appeared as if it were harmless, as if it were the chapter I disliked and not my own person."

This character is feeling even shittier than I am

“I lie stretched out, inert; all I see is emptiness, all I live on is emptiness, all I move in is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain. At least the vulture kept on pecking at Prometheus’s liver, and Loki had the poison constantly dripping down on him; at least there was an interruption, however monotonous. But even pain has lost its power to refresh me."

― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Can't relate, but this is a lovely quote about reading

"All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you."

- Diane Setterfield