“In our silence, in what is unsaid, what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves because communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.”
– Harold Pinter, quoted in Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer, by J. Michael Straczynski
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“Don’t speak, I know just what you’re sayin’
So please stop explainin’
Don’t tell me ’cause it hurts, no, no, no
Don’t speak, I know what you’re thinkin’
And I don’t need your reasons
Don’t tell me ’cause it hurts.”
– No Doubt, Don’t Speak
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Sometimes writing can be diplomacy: we have the chance to negotiate with ourselves before we speak our thoughts out loud to the world.
If we feel angry or frustrated, the page offers a place to write it down, to yell at the page rather than to yell in the face of another.
The pen doesn’t make a noise.
You can say the most extreme, vile, vicious things and you don’t have to take them back because they’ve just been absorbed into neutral ground.
The page is a no man’s land between yourself and the rest of the world.
You can choose to share those words or not.
They’re not immediately accessible to others – it is an early warning mechanism, a safety valve, a safe space to let off steam.
At times I read over what has burst out of me: I feel a bit silly; and I’m grateful for the power to destroy my terrible prose.
By writing we realise that life is never so black and white as war or surrender. There’s more nuance to it.
I want to celebrate diplomacy. I want to be a diplomat rather than a general. I want to find compromise with myself, rather than force a confrontation with others.
This is an unusual love letter to a sacred art that does not need to be shared. But those words which are shared and those which are kept tight to our chest, are the same words. The same methods can serve two very different functions.
It’s nice to share the positive and burn the negative.
Conversations With Quotations 