Deborah Eisenberg Quotes

• You write something and there’s no reality to it. You can’t inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Writing, Reality, Earthquakes

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• Nothing is more fortifying than learning that you have a real reader, a reader who truly responds both accurately and actively. It gives you courage, and you feel, I can crawl out on the branch a little further. It’s going to hold.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Real, Giving, Branches

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• It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Running, People, Our Family

  Deborah Eisenberg (2016). “Twilight of the Superheroes”, p.44, Pan Macmillan

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• Art is inherently subversive. It’s destabilizing. It undermines what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Art, Thinking, Opposites

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• Every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and...the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Looks, Lines, Way

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• Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Writing, Fiction, Done

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• Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Stars, Dancer, Intuition

  Deborah Eisenberg (2016). “Twilight of the Superheroes”, p.36, Pan Macmillan

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• When one writes, there’s the double horror of discovering not only what it is that one so fears but also the triviality of that fear.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Writing, Horror, Triviality

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• I don't think things are ever exactly the way one expects, and I don't think things are ever the way one assumes they are at the moment. What I actually think is that one has no idea of what things are like, ever.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Thinking, Ideas, Way

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• Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Change, Thinking, One Day

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• I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It’s not something to be approached casually.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Writing, Holy, Stills

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• The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicized so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy. A lot of fiction comes out of a child's feeling of, "Hey, that's not fair."

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Children, Writing, Feelings

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• The task is not primarily to have a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure the essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Essence, Giving, Tasks

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• time is as adhesive as love, and the more time you spend with someone the greater the likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent sort of thing to deal with that people casually refer to as 'friendship,' as if that were the end of the matter.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Friendship, People, Finding Yourself

  Deborah Eisenberg (2011). “Under the 82nd Airborne: Stories”, p.4, Macmillan

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• I'm a person with virtually no feelings.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Feelings, Persons

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• I’m a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. It’s certainly the most miserable state to be in but it’s also tremendously gratifying, really—rage feels justified. And it’s an excellent substitute for action. Why would you want to sacrifice rage to go about the long, difficult, dreary business of making something more tolerable?

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Sacrifice, Long, Experts

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• Everything makes me angry, unless it makes me sad.

  Deborah Eisenberg

  Make Me Angry, Angry

  Deborah Eisenberg (2010). “The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg: Stories”, p.126, Macmillan

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