Verlyn Klinkenborg Quotes & Sayings

Research, in nature's laboratory, never stops. It explores every possibility. It never lacks funding. It is never demoralized by failed experiments. It cannot be lobbied. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

Without extraneous words or phrases or clauses, there will be room for implication. The longer the sentence, the less it's able to imply, And writing by implication should be one of your goals. Implication is almost nonexistent in the prose that surrounds you, The prose of law, science, business, journalism, and most academic fields. It was nonexistent in the way you were taught to write. That means you don't know how to use one of a writer's most important tools: The ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow, The ability to speak to the reader in silence. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

Volunteer sentences are the relics of your education And the desire to emulate the grown-up, workaday prose that surrounds you, Which is made overwhelmingly of sentences that are banal and structurally thoughtless. A volunteer sentence is almost always a perfunctory sentence. That can change. But only after years of questioning the shapes of sentences you read, And every sentence you write. Don't let the word "years" alarm you. Think of it as months and months and months and months. You may think a volunteer sentence is an inspired one Simply because it volunteers. This is one reason to abandon the idea of inspiration. All the idea of inspiration will do Is stop you from revising a volunteer sentence. Only revision will tell you whether a sentence that offers itself is worth keeping. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

Solve global warming, eliminate the nuclear threat, and we will still have to confront the vastness of our species and the way it diminishes, without thinking, all the other species around it. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn't learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God's injunction and Adam's loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. "Hurry," they say, "he'll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

How these humans dispose themselves! Unlike anything else in creation. Or rather like everything else in creation all at once. Legs of one beast. Arms of another. Proportions all awry to a tortoise's eye. Torso too squat. Too little neck. Vastly too much leg. Hands like creatures unto themselves. Senses delicately balanced. And yet each sense dulled by mental acuity. Reason in place of a good nose. Logic instead of a tail. Faith instead of the certain knowledge of instinct. Superstition instead of a shell. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

Nearly everyone is aware of dramatic changes in the world. Yet we continue to live in the assumption that we can ride out the changes without changing ourselves, coasting, as we have always coasted, on the historic wave of human development. What it will take to wake us up is a wave of equal size traveling in the opposite direction. That wave is already on its way. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

When I say the grace of wildness, what I mean is its autonomy, its self-possession, the fact that it has nothing to do with us. The grace is in the separation, the distance, the sense of a self-sustaining way of life. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

Other seasons come abruptly but ask so little when they do. Winter is the only one that has to be relearned. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

The Unexpected stalks a farm in big boots like a vagrant bent on havoc. Not every farmer is an inventor, but the good ones have the seeds of invention within them. Economy and efficiency move their relentless tinkering and yet the real motive often seems to be aesthetic. The mind that first designed a cutter bar is not far different from a mind that can take the intractable steel of an outsized sickle blade and make it hum in the end. The question is how to reduce the simplicity that constitutes a problem ("It's simple; it's broke.") to the greater simplicity that constitutes a solution. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature. Rather than change the earth to suit a crop ... it would diversify its crops to suit the earth — Verlyn Klinkenborg

(Home is) a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes it will become the very bedrock of our being. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

With luck, you were read aloud to as a child. — Verlyn Klinkenborg