Compression Quotes - Page 2

• She once complained that her stories were like 'birds bred in cages,' but that concentrated atmosphere, that claustrophobic hothouse of emotion, was her talent. Her stories were little masterpieces of compression: she succinctly contained whole lifetimes in a few pages, every moment loaded with as much as it could bear.

  Katie Roiphe

  Bird, Atmosphere, Stories

  Katie Roiphe (2007). “Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939”, p.70, Dial Press

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• I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  Dream, Book, Writing

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• Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?

  Samuel Beckett

  Book, Obscurity, Obscure

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• As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, People, Kind

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• Robert Creeley has forged a signature style in American poetry, an idiosyncratic, highly elliptical, syntactical compression by which the character of his mind’s concentrated and stumbling proposals might be expressed … Reading his poems, we experience the gnash of arriving through feeling at thought and word.

  Forrest Gander

  Reading, Character, Feelings

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• The thing I see happening is that there's a real compression between generations. There used to be about 20 years difference (in technology use). Now you talk to 15-year-old kids and their 9-year-old brother or sister is using stuff that they don't understand.

  Paul Saffo

  Brother, Real, Kids

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• Richard Christian Matheson is a master of compression. He knows how to catch a moment in words and convey it straight to the reader's heart.

  Clive Barker

  Christian, Heart, Moments

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• Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.

  Laura Riding

  Long, Giving, May

  "The Promise of Words". London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23, September 07, 1995.

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• At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Order, Years, Cities

  "'Lagos shows how a city can recover from a deep, deep pit': Rem Koolhaas talks to Kunlé Adeyemi". Interview with Chris Michael, www.theguardian.com. February 26, 2016.

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• What would you not have accomplished if you had been free?" "Possibly nothing at all; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced — from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination.

  Alexandre Dumas

  Illumination, Clouds, Light

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• Only when the kulak refused to deliver grain to the State did [Joseph] Stalin, under the pressure of the Left Opposition, accomplish a sharp turn. Being the empiricist that he is, he moved, to the opposite extreme, and set as a task for two or three years the collectivization of all the peasantry, the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, and the compression of the Five Year Plan into four years.

  Leon Trotsky

  Years, Opposites, Class

  Source: www.marxists.org

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• Chekhov used to correspond with aspiring writers, and once he gave this advice to Maxim Gorky when he was encouraging him to pare his wordy sentences: "When someone expends the least amount of motion on a given action, that's grace." The short story, by definition, embodies this notion of grace, because it requires such forceful compression to achieve its effects.

  Catherine Brady

  Advice, Grace, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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