“Writing is a transformative act and writing the occult, which I interpret as writing what’s invisible, or apparently invisible, is inevitably connected to writing my desire as a woman…”

— Ariana Reines

On writing as a woman in “INTERVIEW WITH ARIANA REINES” http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-ariana-reines/ in The White Review (July 2019)

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Ariana Reines4

American writer 1982

Hugh Prather (1938–2010) American writer

Source: Notes to Myself

“Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself.”

Alice Oswald (1966) British poet

Get Writing (2004), as quoted in Modern Women Poets (2005) by Deryn Rees-Jones, p. 392
Context: Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word – a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language that you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you. Remembering that language is the whole skill of writing well.

“The Christian world seethed not only with apocryphal writings, but with hostile interpretations of writings not apocryphal.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

p, 125
New Fragments (1892)

“Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

Source: The Cabinet Council (published 1658), Chapter 25

“Less apparent is that bland writing — timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing – is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)
Context: Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?
When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work. The pervasive brutality in current fiction – the death, disease, dysfunction, depression, dismemberment, drug addiction, dementia, and dreary little dramas of domestic discord – is an obvious example of how language in exploitative, cynical or simply neurotic hands can add to the weariness, the darkness in the world. Less apparent is that bland writing — timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing – is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies.

“Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.”

Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995) author, activist, professor