Freehand Life

A most spectacular dinner conversation. Literally.

November 19, 2012 — 2 Comments

Knock, knock.

What  do you get when stringing several famous quotes together?

Answer: a most spectacular dinner conversation.

I invited 12 of my closest literary friends through time and space to gather around for this mélange of ideas and opinions.

These poets, diarist, novelist, and satirist are all seekers, lovers, and stalwarts.

Let the banter begin…

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.  We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely… by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria — which is our actual experience.”
Joan Didion

“Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
Anaïs Nin

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ ”
Jack Kerouac

“The Soul selects her own Society.”
Emily Dickinson

“Really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.  Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meetings are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes direction.”
Paulo Coelho

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
Chuck Palahniuk

“Come, my friends,

’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

“What you seek is seeking you.”
Rumi

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
James Joyce

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

“Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.”
Ayn Rand