Chila Woychik Quotes

When reading a book, one hopes it doesn’t turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.

1838

If a book can save - redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane - surely, there must be a God.

3687

The setting sun threatened to consume me - it could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and walked away; I would live another day.

3271

This world rubs me raw, scours me smooth like an SOS pad put to a grease-caked skillet. And pain: it stabs and scrapes and pulls me back to earth, my final B&B, that worm-spun cot of cool black sod.

2441

I don’t want to believe in boxes or one-way relationships; I’m naïve, you see. I’d rather moon the moon than flip off a friend, but sometimes I flip so I don’t get flipped. And I still think I’m misunderstanding the Golden Rule.

3666

I speak, I speak, and truth at that. Writers are a curious breed: brooding, fickle, alternately loving and hating their work - and each other. You’re my friend? Don’t pick up that pen!

1185

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam’s cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

2638

This piece of earth I billet grows small. Bullets of time dart past, dropping shards of opportunity at my feet. And until the rift that surrounds my decaying body clamps shut - swallows me up like so many remains - I army on, simultaneously ignoring and saving my comrades in the hole.
Such is a writer’s life.

2191

I’ve had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

1173

I have a bad habit of dropping verbal pellets to get a reaction, like Ursula LeGuin’s “A novelist’s business is lying” (that particular one got a lot of attention on Facebook), or, “Why is it that Christians hate the word ‘sex’?

3770

I’ve learned to lick
my own foul wounds
and prize the taste of ache.

4360

God, O God, where art thou? Thou art as distant to me as the lady combing rice in the Yunnan Province of China or a piece of floating space debris circling Pegasi. In this feeling-dead world of post traumatic stress, skepticism is king, queen, and court jester.

2415

I suck the words word-dry
to me, assimilated
orderly at breakeye speed
still hard and harder
softer then
line-lined book-dry
‘til not a drop
of water-blood
from oak and elm
and authored men
is left to whisper
“Read…

1263