Paul Harding Quotes & Sayings

But a huge part of being a writer is discovering your own intellectual and aesthetic autonomy, and how you best get the best words onto the page. — Paul Harding

I had a deep and abiding love for the idea that this life is not something that we are forced to endure but rather something in which we are blessed to be allowed to participate. But I felt no gratitude whatsoever for, and no relief from, the pain I experienced every waking moment, and this life felt like nothing more than a distillation of sorrow and anger. — Paul Harding

When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart. — Paul Harding

There is my father whispering in my ear, Be still still still. And yet you change everything. What was the marsh like, waiting for the storm before you came and kneeled in the water? It was nothing. Watch after you leave the water, now cold and regretful, miles from home, certain of the belt on your backside, the cold shoulder, the extra chores; watch. Watch the water heal itself of your presence
not to repair injury but to offer itself again should you care to risk another strapping [ ... ]. — Paul Harding

Howard thought, Is it not true: A move of the head, a step to the left or right, and we change from wise, decent, loyal people to conceited fools? Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely: Sun catches cheap plate flaking
I am a tinker; the moon is an egg glowing in its nest of leafless trees
I am a poet; a brochure for an asylum is on the dresser
I am an epileptic, insane; the house is behind me
I am a fugitive. His despair had not come from the fact that he was a fool; he knew he was a fool. The despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verses from two-penny religious magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and see him as something better. — Paul Harding

Don't write your books for people who won't like them. Give yourself wholly to the kind of book you want to write and don't try to please readers who like something different. Otherwise, you'll end up with the worst of both worlds. I write lyrical, introspective, experiential books concerned with consciousness and perception. If a reader wants to know what my protagonist's insurance policies are, he'll be better off curling up with a nice cup of chamomile tea and an actuarial table. Similarly, don't write your books for bad readers. Your books will suffer from bad readers no matter what, so write them for brilliant, big-brained and big-hearted people who will love you for feeding their minds with feasts of beauty. — Paul Harding

I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant - step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word. — Paul Harding

The joy of those years had its own integrity, and Kate existed within that. She could not be touched by the misery caused by her own death. — Paul Harding

What of miniature boats constructed of birch bark and fallen leaves, launched onto cold water clear as air? How many fleets were pushed out toward the middles of ponds or sent down autumn brooks, holding treasures of acorns, or black feathers, or a puzzled mantis? Let those grassy crafts be listed alongside the iron hulls that cleave the sea, for they are all improvisations built from the daydreams of men, and all will perish, whether from the ocean siege or October breeze. — Paul Harding

Just beneath our feet, on the other side of the surface of the earth, there is another, subterranean Enon, which conceals its secret business by conducting it too slowly for its purposes to be observed by the living. — Paul Harding

There was the sky, filled with flat-topped clouds, cruising like a fleet of anvils across the blue. George — Paul Harding

There was a moment of sorrow, disappointment, and deep love for his son, whom he at that second wished had had a chance of real escape. Never mind why or whether or who or what consequence or ramification
the wake of sorrow and bitterness and resentment you would trail behind you, probably mostly for me
I just wish that you had made it beyond the bounds of this cold little radius, that when the archaeologists brush off this layer of our world in a million years and string off the boundaries of our rooms and tag and number every plate and table leg and shinbone, you would not be there; yours would not be the remains they would find and label juvenile male. — Paul Harding

Perhaps, Howard thought, the curtains and murals and pastel angels are a mercy, a dim reflection of things fit for the fragility of human beings. — Paul Harding

The fictional world seems larger, seems to have more dimension and richness when, for example, the protagonist from one novel you've read has a cameo role in another. I think that recognition is a very, very powerful phenomenon; it is one of the deepest and greatest pleasures of reading. — Paul Harding

He saw no reason to doubt that his shadow dreamed just as he did for the reason that he could imagine himself to be a shadow of something - someone - else and that perhaps even his sleep, his dreams, constituted his duty as a shadow of someone else and that perhaps while THAT someone else dreamed, he was free to live his waking life, so that this alternating, interdependent series of lives formed a sort of intaglio; the waking day of each shadow was the opposite side of its possessor's sleep. — Paul Harding

Howard resented the ache in his heart. He resented that it was there every morning when he woke up ... He resented equally the ache and resentment itself. He resented his resentment because it was a sign of his limitations of spirit and humility, no matter that he understood that such was each man's burden. He resented the ache because it was uninvited, seemed imposed, a sentence, and, despite the encouragement he gave himself each morning, it baffled him because it was there whether the day was good or bad, whether he witnessed major kindness or minor transgression, suffered sourceless grief or spontaneous joy. — Paul Harding

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough. — Paul Harding

I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and coloured me until back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world ... — Paul Harding

My mind blazed with ravishing lies. I thought, I cannot accept this gift of myself, myself as a gift, of my person, of having this mind that does not stop burning, that deceives itself and consumes itself and immolates itself and believes its own lies and chokes on plain fact. — Paul Harding

I'm no online whiz, but I'm not a Luddite, either. I love that we have these laptops and tablets and smart phones; they're awesome and convenient and all that. It's more about maintaining balance. Technology should always be a predicate of the true subject: our individual humanity, our examined lives. — Paul Harding

On the seventh day, Howard turned off the trail and sat by the river and smoked a pipeful of tobacco that he had packed for the hermit. As he smoked, he listened to the voices in the rapids. They murmured about a place somewhere deep in the woods where a set of bones lay on a bed of moss, above which a troop of mournful flies had kept vigil the previous autumn until the frosts came, and they, too, had succumbed. — Paul Harding

The house had not merely lapsed back into the equilibrium of the woods but was blighted, as if inside it did not contain a hearth and a chair and a bed but my cankered heart. — Paul Harding

I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am a century wide. I think I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. Thank you. Now, let me read you something to get you back to sleep. — Paul Harding

Write as precisely and as lucidly and as richly as you can about what you find truly mysterious and irreducible about human experience, and not obscurely about what will prove to be received opinion or cliche once the reader figures out your stylistic conceit. There's all the difference in the world between mystery and mystification. — Paul Harding

I just wish that you had made it beyond the bounds of this cold little radius, that when the archaeologists brush off this layer of our world in a million years and string off the boundaries of our rooms and tag and number every plate and table leg and shinbone, you would not be there; yours would not be the remains they would fine and label juvenile male; you would be a secret, the existence of which they would never even be aware to try to solve. — Paul Harding

... and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love ... — Paul Harding

God know my shame as I push my mule to exhaustion, even after the moon and Venus have risen to preside over the owls and mice, because I am not going back to my family - my wife, my children - because my wife's silence is not the forbearance of decent, stern people who fear You; it is the quiet of outrage, of bitterness. It is the quiet of biding time. God forgive me. I am leaving. — Paul Harding

I woke up every morning on the couch. It felt like the same morning all the time, or like an infinite series of nested dreams from which every day I imagined I awoke but I only ever really arose into another dream. — Paul Harding

Don't confine truth to fact. Imaginative truth is as powerful, and often enough, more so than fact. — Paul Harding

But it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating. — Paul Harding

When it came time to die, we knew and went to deep yards where we lay down and our bones turned to brass. We were picked over. We were used to fix broken clocks, music boxes; our pelvises were fitted onto pinions, our spines soldered into cast works. Our ribs were fitted as gear teeth and tapped and clicked like tusks. This is how, finally, we were joined. — Paul Harding

And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. — Paul Harding

I worry that if whatever pops into your head at any instant immediately goes online, you lose the crucial time for your thoughts to simmer and evolve and build up nuance, depth and empathy. — Paul Harding

If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game. — Paul Harding

...exiled in an obscure dead water of time... — Paul Harding

The silver lining of those years when I was trying to get 'Tinkers' published but couldn't were the years when I had to decide, Why do I want to be a writer? I realized that writing is the thing itself; writing is not a means to publication, writing is not a predicate of publication, so I spent years making art for art's sake. — Paul Harding

The flowers Howard now walked among were the few last heirs to that brief local span of disaster and regeneration and he felt close to the sort of secrets he often caught himself wondering about, the revelations of which he only ever realized he had been in the proximity of after he became conscious of that proximity, and that phenomenon , of becoming conscious, was the very thing that whisked him away, so that any bit of insight or afterglow that remained but that was not accessible through words. He thought, But what about through grass and flowers and light and shadow? — Paul Harding

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth. — Paul Harding

That she made a point to eat only the gristliest chicken bits, the burned biscuits, the mealiest potatoes, while she complained that his children were, variously, weak-minded, hysterical or sickly, and seemed to imply that such afflictions were the result of the lack of a good piece of steak or a new bonnet, was only circumstance; were she installed on a throne at a twelve-course banquet table teaming with all of God's creatures brought from both air and field, trussed and roasted and swimming in their own succulent juices, she would heap her plate with the most exquisite victuals and lament that his feeble offspring were the way they were because they had it too well and what they really needed was a vat of cold porridge and a tureen full of dirt. — Paul Harding

Who was the greatest business man ever ... The greatest salesman? Advertiser? Who? ... It was Jesus ... Jesus was the founder of modern business ... he picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world! — Paul Harding

The interlocking network of stalks and branches and creepers was skeletal, the fossil yard of an extinct species of fineboned insectoid creatures. all of these bones, then, seemed to have been stained by sun and earth from an original living white to brown, and not the tough fibrous flower and seed-spilling green they actually once had been. Howard wondered about a man who had never seen summer, a winter man, examining the weeds and making this inference
that he was looking at an ossuary. the man would take that as true and base his ideas of the world on that mistake. — Paul Harding

heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? — Paul Harding

The person contained hundreds of years, but they overlapped, as if the person experienced any number of times at once. I was just thinking, the person said in a silvery voice, I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am a century wide. I think that I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. Thank you. — Paul Harding

I loved her totally, and while I loved her, the world was love. Once she was gone, the world seemed to prove nothing more than ruins and the smoldering dreams of monsters. — Paul Harding

What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other. — Paul Harding

O, Senator, drop your trousers! Loosen your cravat! Eschew your spats and step into that shallow, teeming world of mayflies and dragonflies and frogs' eyes staring eye-to-eye with your own, and the silty bottom. Cease your filibuster against the world God gave you. — Paul Harding

My father would say, The forgotten songs we never really knew, only think we remember knowing, when what we really do is understand at the same time how we have never really know them at all and how glorious they must really be. — Paul Harding

I was just delighted to be a legitimate, for-real published author. — Paul Harding

Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit's existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers' shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the ice and snow, where the frozen forest itself, would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap. — Paul Harding

Thought that he was a clock was like a clock was like a spring in a clock when it breaks and explodes when he had his fits. But he was not like a clock or at least was only like a clock to me. But to himself? Who knows? And so it is not he who was like a clock but me. — Paul Harding

I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it. — Paul Harding

He imagined that his memoirs might now sound like those of an admirable stranger, a person he did not know but whom he immediately recognized and loved dearly. Instead, the voice he heard sounded nasally and pinched and, worse, not very well educated, as if he were a bumpkin who had been called, perhaps even in mockery, to testify about holy things, as if not the testimony but the fumbling through it were the reason for his presence in front of some dire, heavenly senate. — Paul Harding

Houses can be ghosts, too, just like people. — Paul Harding

Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed. — Paul Harding