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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 3h

close to his own life, delayed publication, and rewrote the entire thing in third. Most writers would treat a finished manuscript as final. He treated it as one of the decisions that only looked that way.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 3h

a father who never came back, memories that turn out to have been lies. A warning about needless finality arrives among people already covered in it. There is a wrinkle behind the book worth knowing. Irving wrote all eight hundred pages in first person, then judged the material too

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 3h

extra ones. It is counsel about restraint. In this particular novel, almost nobody in it takes the advice. Every major character in "Until I Find You" has been marked for life, some by ink and some by abandonment or abuse. The whole book is built on permanence: tattoos that cannot come off,

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 3h

The sentence sorts decisions into two piles. Some close a door permanently, and life will hand you a steady supply of those whether you want them or not. The rest only look permanent. Mrs. Oastler isn't advising courage about the first kind, which would be pointless. She's saying stop manufacturing

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 3h

“Life forces enough final decisions on us," Mrs. Oastler continued. "We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.” --John Winslow Irving (1942- ) From “Until I Find You” (2005) Spoken by the character Leslie Oastler #writerslift #life #coffee #quotes #JohnIrving

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Barcelona, and Buenos Aires before settling in Guadalajara, he'd spent years as a foreigner in other people’s offices, which is the particular circle of waiting this describes. The pen name is his own construction, assembled from José Saramago and Pío Baroja.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

which means the line isn't a throwaway grumble. It's a running idea in the stories: that the paperwork follows you past the grave, and that the forms outlast the people filling them in. Baroja wrote it from inside the experience. A Chilean from Valdivia who moved through Mexico City, Toronto,

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

He is not saying bureaucracy resembles purgatory. He says it is the worse of the two, because the one that exists has no guarantees. It sits in a book preoccupied with exactly that. The collection’s prologue describes the dead returning to warn that bureaucracies carry over into the next world,

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

The joke turns on the inversion. Purgatory at least has a doctrine behind it: a fixed term, a purpose, an exit. The waiting means something, and it ends. A government office offers the same indefinite queue, without any theology, no promised release, and no one who can tell you how long.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

“The closest thing to purgatory is a government agency, only the first does not exist and the second is very real.” –José Baroja, pen name of Ramón Mauricio González Gutiérrez (b. 1983) From "Sueño en Guadalajara y otros cuentos” 2023 Translated from the Spanish #josebaroja #quotes #life #authors

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

This is the same book that gave us the line about those who forget the past. He had a gift for compressing an argument into a sentence that outlived its chapter.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

the eye of William James and with T. S. Eliot among his students, and the whole five-volume project is an attempt to show reason at work inside ordinary human activity rather than above it.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

whether he can still say what the effort is for, in terms that would have satisfied him at the start. Redoubling feels like commitment from the inside. It arrives precisely when the reason for commitment has gone missing. Santayana was in his forties at Harvard when he wrote it, teaching under

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

look different from the outside. The difference is entirely internal, and invisible to the person it is happening to. That last point is the sting. A fanatic by this definition cannot detect the condition by examining how hard he is working, because the working is the symptom. The only test is

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The definition is mechanical rather than moral, which is what makes it useful. Santayana doesn't say fanatics believe wrong things, or believe them too strongly. He says the aim has dropped out and the effort has continued, and then accelerated to compensate. Nothing about the fanatic’s energy would

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.” –George Santayana (born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás) (1863–1952) From “The Life of Reason, Vol. I: Reason in common Sense” (1905) #georgesantayana #quotes #life #authors #love #art #coffee #diary

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

travel abroad in numbers for the first time. Michener had spent the war in the South Pacific and built a career on writing places from the inside out. The warning is aimed at a brand-new kind of tourist, and it has aged better than most things written about them.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

which is closer to advice. He is not scolding the reluctant traveler.He is telling them, fairly gently, that they have confused moving their body with going somewhere. He wrote it in "Holiday" in March 1956, at the height of that magazine’s run, when postwar Americans were beginning to

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

reasonable than the last, and the reader usually agrees to two before noticing where it ends. The closing clause does the work, and its oddness is deliberate. Not “stay at home,” which is where you already are, but “stay home,” and not “might as well,” which would be a shrug, but “might better,”

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Four verbs, escalating. Rejecting food is a preference. Ignoring customs is a choice. Fearing the religion is an attitude you brought with you. Avoiding the people gives the game away, because by then nothing of the place is left except scenery. Michener builds the list so each item sounds more

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.” –James A. Michener (1907–1997) From Holiday magazine (March 1956), pp. 40–51 Also collected in "Good Advice" (1982), compiled by Leonard Safir and William Safire #jamesmichener #quotes

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

John Green has described rereading her and realizing he had not been paying attention to his own attention. A line about how to spend a life became widely known because hers was cut short.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

It reached most of us through loss. Austin Kleon quoted it in a memorial post the week she died in March 2017, aged fifty-one, shortly after publishing an essay inviting someone to marry her husband after she was gone.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

but that it's pretty much all the information you need. That's a large thing to assert, and she asserts it in a tweet, with abbreviations, in capitals, which is part of why it carries. It sounds like someone saying a thing she has just worked out rather than someone dispensing wisdom from a lectern.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Where your attention actually goes, unbidden, when nobody is assessing you, is data you did not author and therefore cannot fake. The evidence already exists. You just haven't looked at it. Note the strength of the second claim. Not that attention is a useful signal among several,

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

#anykrouserosenthal #quotes #life #coffee #diary #write The advice inverts the usual question. Most career counsel asks what you want, inviting you to construct an answer, and people are poor witnesses to what they actually want. Rosenthal says to skip the self-report and read the record instead.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

“For anyone trying to discern what to do with their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That's pretty much all the info you need.” --Amy Krouse Rosenthal (1965–2017) As quoted in “Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad.” Workman Publishing Company. p. 114, (2019)

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The argument is older than him, going back to Gramsci on hegemony, but Zinn’s version is plainer and names the three groups he holds responsible.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

tolerant the whole arrangement is. Zinn wrote it in 1990, between the Cold War’s end and the first Gulf War, in a book he framed as cross-examining American ideology. He had been a bombardier in the Second World War, which shaped the pacifism that runs through everything he wrote afterward.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

describes a society where the available choices are real but bounded, the way three television networks offer a genuine selection within a settled range. Dissenting ideas are not banned. They are made disreputable, or kept alive in the corners and then displayed as proof of how

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

enforcement at all, because the enforcement has moved inside the citizen. Soldiers in the streets are evidence of a regime in trouble. Their absence proves nothing either way, and that is the uncomfortable part. What he means by dominating ideas is narrower than censorship. In the same chapter, he

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

From “ Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology” (1990) #howardzinn #quotes #life The sentence everyone drops is the one that matters. Zinn’s claim is not that powerful people like favorable coverage, which nobody disputes. It is that a system secure in its ideas needs no

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

“If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.” --Howard Zinn (1922– 2010)

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Reviewers noticed the method, calling it a feminist tale of blood and gold that shows the ways a society cages and commodifies women.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Forna has said plainly what she was doing: the book, in her words, is her anger about being a woman. Born in Sierra Leone and raised in the United States from the age of nine, she wrote a West African secondary world in a genre she has described as having loved her back poorly.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

and only then is the gold available. White Hands is not telling Deka that holy men have been hypocrites. She is telling her that the holiness was the business model, and that the ritual sorting girls by blood colour exists to produce the category that can be bled.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The empire that condemns her as a demon has built an industry out of her. The metaphor and the mechanism are the same thing. The classification is not a mistake that happens to be profitable. It is the permission slip. You cannot harvest a person, so the Elders first establish that she is not one,

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The word to stop on is "literally," because in this book it is not an intensifier. Deka bleeds gold, which her village calls impure, and the punishment is to be killed over and over in a cellar because the gold-blooded do not stay dead. Her blood is then harvested and forged into armor.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

“They enrich themselves by your suffering—parasites, quite literally draining the blood from you.” --Namina Forna (1987- ) From “The Gilded Ones” (2021) #naminaforna #quotes #life #authors #love #art #coffee #diary #write #books #amwriting #writerslift

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I've known a fair number of people whose lives don't fit the template, and they've been among the better company I've kept. They're just people, doing what people do.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

published in 1996 at the height of the feminist sex wars. Bright had spent that decade arguing against other feminists who held that such images were themselves the harm. She is not easing a reader in. She is picking a fight she had already been having for ten years.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

She is arguing that disgust arrives too fast to be evidence of anything except unfamiliarity. The bluntness is a choice, and it belongs to where the passage sits. She wrote it as the introduction to a book of lesbian erotic photography, co-edited with Jill Posener,

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

and the conversion happens before anyone examines it. Her illustration is a child confronted with a vegetable they have never seen: that's disgusting, says the child, who has not tasted it, and will not be moved. She is not arguing that every practice deserves approval.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

She names them: superstition, religion, Christianity, gender bias. Each has shifted repeatedly, and each has been treated as self-evident while it held. The real claim is the one about speed. Unfamiliarity converts into moral judgment almost instantly,

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The word she goes after is "natural," and she goes after it because of the work it does. Calling a practice natural ends the argument before it starts, since nature can't be appealed against. Bright's counter is that the standards doing the judging are not fixed and never were.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

exhibit very childish reactions to sexual practices that are new to them, much like little kids who are offered a vegetable they haven't seen before: “That's disgusting!” “But darling, you haven't even tried it!” “I don't care, I hate it, I hate it!” From the introduction “Nothing But the Girl” 1996

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This is the full quote: “Natural” is a very dangerous word to use about sexuality. Our society's notions of normality are completely fake and meta-trendy, since they rely on the changing standards of superstition, religion, Christianity and gender bias to define themselves. Americans, in particular

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

“‘Natural’ is a very dangerous word to use about sexuality. Our society's notions of normality are completely fake and meta-trendy, since they rely on the changing standards of superstition, religion, Christianity and gender bias to define themselves.” --Susannah "Susie" Bright (1958- )

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

A debut novelist telling readers that an unsatisfying ending is an invitation rather than a verdict was describing, among other things, what she had just done to a genre.

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Author Charles Wiegand @charleswiegand.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

although she loved fantasy growing up, the genre did not love her back. She wrote a West African secondary world in response, and it reached the New York Times list in its first week.

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