Quote of the Day (Jayne Anne Phillips, on How ‘Writers Defy Time’)

“Do writers hate to write? I don’t think so. The sense of difficulty arises from the fact that writers defy time, writing words against the erasure of things and lives. We stand in an avalanche of forgetfulness, resisting the sway of disappearance. Faced with mortality, we mourn what we might have understood and communicated, not in opinion or advice but in the delivery of an invented world we might have saved. Writing, we cross the divide between self and others word by word. In the very act of completing the work, we are separated from it. One way or another, the writer loses writing: the writer loses the book. Opposing oblivion, we begin to understand: language is the way in and the way out.”—American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer Jayne Anne Phillips, Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir (2026)

The image accompanying this post, of Jayne Anne Phillips reading at the 2024 Gaithersburg Book Festival, was taken May 18, 2024, by Frypie.