Quote of the Day 6: Growing Up Eccentric
I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal. Throughout my childhood, I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in my head. I read more than other kids; I luxuriated in books. Books were my refuge. I sat in corners with my little finger hooked over my bottom lip, reading, in a trance, lost in the places and times to which books took me. And there was a moment during my junior year in high school when I began to believe that I could do what other writers were doing. I came to believe that I might be able to put a pencil in my hand and make something magical happen.
Then I wrote some terrible, terrible stories.
- Pg. xx of Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
I still vaguely remember the first time that I came across this passage in my mother’s copy of the book. How it jumped out at me! I saw the similarities between Lamott’s past and my own immediately. I don’t recall when I first became serious about writing, but I was always an avid reader from a young age. In the 6th or 7th grade, I was engrossed in The Red Badge of Courage, while the classic 1984 left me awestruck in the 9th. Nowadays, I am trying to “pen” my own riveting pieces, and I don’t think I’ve done a bad job so far.
Natasha | Personal, Quotes of the Day
