Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week (Inspiration: Divine or Otherwise")

Jan. 12—18, 2025 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “Inspiration—Part One: Divine or Otherwise"

Great Opening Line of the Week

The protagonist, a WWII veteran and struggling young writer with the unusual name of Stingo, opens the novel nicely, but it’s about to get a whole lot better. As he continues, he advances the story with what I regard as literary history’s best-ever description of that dreaded condition known as Writer’s Block:

“At twenty-two, struggling to become some kind of writer, I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast, or wherever my hungriest aspirations once resided. It was not that I no longer wanted to write, I still yearned passionately to produce the novel which had been for so long captive in my brain. It was only that, having written down the first few fine paragraphs, I could not produce any others, or—to approximate Gertrude Stein’s remark about a lesser writer of the Lost Generation—I had the syrup but it wouldn’t pour.”

The novel went on to win the 1980 National Book Award for Fiction, but the story didn’t become a part of popular culture until the 1982 film adaptation, featuring an Oscar-winning performance by Meryl Streep.

For well over 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.

This Week’s Puzzler

This week’s Mystery Man at four stages of his adult life.

On January 12, 1876, this man was born in San Francisco, the illegitimate son of a shady, itinerant astrologer and a mentally unstable mother who was deeply involved in astrology. Raised in a working-class environment, he was an early reader who, at age nine, formed a relationship with a local librarian, Ina Coolbrith (later the poet laureate of California). Later in life, he said he was inspired by her advice to read—and learn—as much as he could.

By adolescence, though, he dropped out of school and bounced around from job to job (shoveling coal, doing cannery work, poaching oysters, and working as a deckhand on a Japan-bound schooner). He never stopped reading, though, and ultimately returned to school at age 19, intent on pursuing a writing career. After getting his high school diploma, he attended the University of California (Berkeley) for one year before his thirst for adventure took him to Alaska in 1897 to personally witness the Klondike Gold Rush.

Within a decade after arriving in Alaska, his writings made him a worldwide celebrity and one of the first American writers to make a fortune from his writing efforts. When he died unexpectedly in 1916 at age forty (from dysentery and kidney problems complicated by alcoholism), he had written more than fifty books, including many set in the gold fields of Alaska. One in particular, published in 1903, went on to become a true American classic. After his death, Upton Sinclair said of him:

“He was the true king of our story tellers, the brightest star that flashed upon our skies.”

In a 1903 essay addressed to young writers, he wrote:

Who is this person? What is the title of his 1903 classic? (Answers below)

What is the Source of Creative Inspiration?

The American Heritage Dictionary defines inspiration this way:

The heart of the word inspiration is the Latin root spir, which literally means “to breathe life into.” The root also shows up in such words as aspiration, respiration, perspiration, and, of course, spiritual. From the beginning, the meaning of inspiration had little to do with the literal act of breathing—the drawing of air into the lungs—but rather with the figurative sense of divine creatures breathing life into mortal human beings.

In Greek mythology, the Muses were nine goddesses who presided over the arts and sciences, each one inspiring excellence in a different artistic or intellectual pursuit. Their influence lives on today in the word muse, which refers to any source of inspiration—a person, an idea, or a mysterious voice from within—which inspires the creation of something.

In the ancient world, it was widely believed that great writers, poets, and artists were not intrinsically gifted, but more like conduits for the goddesses to express themselves. In his Apology (4th c. B.C.), for example, Plato quoted Socrates as saying:

“It was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.”

In The Book of Days (1st c. A.D), the Roman writer Ovid reflected this view:

I’ve always been partial to the idea that writers can be divided into two camps—romantics and realists—and it is clearly the members of the former group who’ve most passionately advanced the idea of being touched by the divine.

In the opening words of “Paradise Lost” (1667), for example, John Milton invoked the “Heavenly Muse” as he sought to write his epic poem about the fall of man. In the very first stanza, he directly asked for divine guidance when he wrote:

“Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first/Wast present.”

The English writer William Blake was another believer. For his entire life, his work was guided by visions that he regarded as divine messages. In an 1826 remark to a friend, he described the process this way:

“I write when commanded by the spirits, and the moment I have written I see the words fly about the room in all directions.”

Some writers have even gone so far as to suggest that, in producing their finest works, they were little more than stenographers. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, said about Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1856):

“I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation.”

When I first came across this anecdote, I found myself thinking, “I wonder what kind of challenge that presented to Stowe’s editor.” And that thought came back to me several years later when I was reading a biography of the English poet Alfred Austin. One time, after an editor pointed out some grammatical errors in his verse, Austin replied:

“I dare not alter these things; they come to me from above.”

When the realists of the world hear their romantic colleagues talk in this way about divine inspiration, they often regard it as a pathetic mixture of self-deception and self-glorification. Some have spoken quite harshly about it.

Other writers in the realist camp have been less concerned with criticizing proponents of inspiration and more focused on putting inspiration in its proper perspective—definitely a factor, but far, far less important than mastering the craft of writing, and even less important than determination, perseverance, and tenacity.

Perhaps the most famous observation on the subject came when Thomas A. Edison—an inventor, not a writer— famously said in 1901:

“Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.”

As the years passed, his essential message was echoed by some of century’s most respected writers:

Another writer who definitely belongs in the realist camp is this week’s Mystery Man, and his quotation in this week’s Puzzler about going after inspiration “with a club” is pretty good advice for any writer who’s feeling uninspired, blocked, dried up, or in general having trouble getting words from their minds to the page. But how does a struggling writer go after inspiration? Let me bring this week’s post to an end with a few ideas on the subject.

(1) Keep working. In his 1936 autobiography, Igor Stravinsky wrote: “Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.” But Gertrude Atherton may have expressed it best when she had a character in her 1923 novel Black Oxen say:

“Get up every morning with the set intention of writing and go to your desk and sit there for three hours, whether you accomplish anything or not. Before long you will find that you are writing madly, not waiting for inspiration.”

(2) Take a walk. The writer Gretel Ehrlich once wrote that “Walking is also an ambulation of mind.” In offering the thought, she may have been influenced by Henry David Thoreau, who wrote in an 1851 journal entry: “The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” And then, a moment later, he added: “the sources of thought burst forth and fertilize my brain.”

(3) Take a writing nap. I’ve been taking daily naps—usually for 45 to 60 minutes—for decades, and I heartily recommend the practice to you. But I’ve also discovered that, when I’m struggling with my writing, I lie down, close my eyes, and let my mind rove wherever it wants to. I keep a notebook close at hand to capture any stray thoughts that come to mind. I rarely fall asleep, and I almost always approach my writing with a new perspective—and sometime with a real gem that has emerged from my reverie.

In Simple Abundance (1995), Sarah Ban Breathnach captured my sentiments perfectly when she wrote:

“When we nap, we are resting our eyes while our imaginations soar. Getting ready for the next round. Sorting, sifting, separating the profound from the profane, the possible from the improbable…. This requires a prone position. If we’re lucky, we might drift off, but we won’t drift far. Just far enough to ransom our creativity from chaos.”

(4) Read something. Not just anything, though. If you’re a prose writer, choose some poetry from the works of your favorite poet. I’ve done it many times over the years, inspired by the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard, who wrote in a 1937 book:

“The poet is more the inspirer than the one who is inspired.”

The same advice—but in reverse—applies to struggling poets. Read something from your favorite prose writer. Or simply browse through a book of quotations, preferably one that is organized by topic, and not by author. One particularly good online database of quotations, if I do say so myself, may be found here. In less than an hour of inspirational reading, you may be surprised how prescient Ralph Waldo Emerson was when he wrote in an 1837 essay:

“Books are for nothing but to inspire.”

This week, take a few minutes to reflect on the role that creative inspiration has played in your own life. Think especially about any moments in your own life when an important surge of inspiration resulted in a new idea, an enhanced understanding, or a breakthrough in your thinking. Also think about those moments in your life when, like Stingo in Sophie’s Choice, you knew you had the syrup in you, but it just wouldn’t pour. As usual, I’ve assembled a number of quotations to assist you in your reflections:

• Inspiration is the richest nation I know, the most powerful on earth. — Sylvia Ashton-Warner

• A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it’s better than no inspiration at all. — Rita Mae Brown

• If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, choose learning. It works more of the time. — Lois McMaster Bujold

• If you wait for inspiration or that thing to hit you, you’re dead. Action breeds inspiration more than inspiration breeds action. — Willem Dafoe

• It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion who cannot write well under other circumstances. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know what inspiration is—I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it. — William Faulkner

• There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where. — G. C. Lichtenberg

• My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director. Cole Porter

• Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. — Ned Rorem

• Inspiration cannot be willed, although it can be wooed. — Anthony Storr

• Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression. — Henry David Thoreau

For source information on the quotations above, and many more observations on the theme of INSPIRATION, go here.

Cartoon of the Week:

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

Jack London (1876-1916). The Call of the Wild (1903)

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week:

Thanks for joining me this week. See you next Sunday, when I’ll be taking this week’s theme in a whole new direction:

“Inspiration—Part Two: Inspiring Words”

Mardy Grothe

Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note