4 Quotes by Joe Moran

Well into his thirties he dreamed of having to go to school as a grown-up, opening his desk, and rummaging inside to hide his face, “suffering over again with increased intensity the shyness and sense of disgrace of my boyhood.” And yet Wallace came to be grateful for what he called his “constitutional shyness,” which he felt had given him long periods of solitary study and a hesitancy over words that led him to avoid the verbosity that marred so many scholarly works.

Sentences are our writing commons, the shared ground where every writer walks.

But so much writing is just ambient word static, typographic white noise. Picture your sentence up in lights, a stack of words staring straight back at you, demanding thought, and it focuses the mind.

In a fast world in pursuit of instant answers, slowness has become a dissident act. Perhaps a sentence slowly written, and slowly relished, could work in the same way, as a last redoubt against the glib articulacy of a distracted age.