lesson planning for my creative writing class...

“it suggests a morality but offers no moral” –Janet Burroway

“Literature is never only about ideas, but about the experience of ideas” –John Ciardi

“Telling the truth by telling a lie.” –Janet Burroway

“The writer of fiction should not try to solve such questions as those of God, pessimism, and so forth. What is obligatory for the artist is not solving a problem but stating a problem correctly” –Anton Chekov

“Negative capability is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” –John Keats

“A story then speculates on a possible truth. It is not an answer or a law but a supposition, an exploration. It offers no ultimate solution.” –Janet Burroway

“The greater the work, the more it refers us to some permanent human impulse rather than an easy slogan or a given institutional embodiment of that impulse. Fine writing expands our scope by continually presenting a new way of seeing, a further possibility of emotional identification.” –Janet Burroway.

“Not all experience reveals, but all revelations come through experience. Books aspire to become a part of that revelatory experience, and the books that are made in the form of fiction attempt to do so by re-creating the experience of revelation.” –Janet Burroway.

From Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft  -Janet Burroway