48 Quotes by Paul Harding

When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.

When it came time to die, we knew and went to deep yards where we lay down and our bones turned to brass. We were picked over. We were used to fix broken clocks, music boxes; our pelvises were fitted onto pinions, our spines soldered into cast works. Our ribs were fitted as gear teeth and tapped and clicked like tusks. This is how, finally, we were joined.

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it?

I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am a century wide. I think I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. Thank you. Now, let me read you something to get you back to sleep.

Boy to his dying grampa: "I am a century wide. I think that I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you.

I'm no online whiz, but I'm not a Luddite, either. I love that we have these laptops and tablets and smart phones; they're awesome and convenient and all that. It's more about maintaining balance. Technology should always be a predicate of the true subject: our individual humanity, our examined lives.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Write as precisely and as lucidly and as richly as you can about what you find truly mysterious and irreducible about human experience, and not obscurely about what will prove to be received opinion or cliche once the reader figures out your stylistic conceit. There's all the difference in the world between mystery and mystification.

I worry that if whatever pops into your head at any instant immediately goes online, you lose the crucial time for your thoughts to simmer and evolve and build up nuance, depth and empathy.