Immersion Quotes

Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen. Here I might leave my bones.

When the ocean surges, don't let me just hear it. Let it splash inside my chest!

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree.

Love is the water of life, jump into this water.

The whole business of love is to drown in the sea.

We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book, And calculating profits--so much help By so much reading. It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth-- 'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

With a book he was regardless of time.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.

Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is THERE, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. He cannot refuse, then, to participate. The logic of events always gives way to the logic of the senses.

Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it — or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.

Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

I don't want the public to see the world they live in while they're in the Park (Disneyland). I want to feel they're in another world.

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

Feel the delight of walking in the noisy street and being the noise.

Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly.

Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons.

I tried to empty myself and let the spirit of Sethe inhabit me.

Don’t wait any longer. Dive in the ocean, Leave and let the sea be you.