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The Arvon Friends Office has been collecting some delicious words on friendship. Here’s some turns of phrase for all friends out there. (Thanks to Sara for compiling these.)
Jane Austen -
Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.
Italian Proverb -
He who finds a friend, finds a treasure
Jane Austen -
Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.
C S Lewis -
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.”
Sir Francis Bacon -
We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.
Oscar Wilde -
True friends stab you in the front.
W H Auden -
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
William Blake -
The bird a nest
the spider a web
the human friendship.
Virginia Woolf
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
Mark Twain -
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
William Shakespeare (from Much Ado about Nothing) -
Friendship is constant in all other things save in the office and affairs of love . . .
I want zany words nudging each other
Giggling teenage girls
Tottering on gangly loops,
Hiccoughing glottal stops.
I want singing sounds
Punning, balancing
Acrobats across two sentences
To clutter syntax.
Underground, beneath words,
Dark roots grow, birth
Flowers of meaning.
40 Words is part of an online word installation on the Arvon Blog. This is shortlisted piece from the Arvon/DXN Magazine competition 2008. Writers were invited to send 40 Words on Words to celebrate Arvon’s 40th birthday this year.
Words, Wittgenstein’s net, to grasp the world -
and many worlds. One single word
wafts myriad thoughts: ‘free’ ‘fuck’ ‘global’…
Words, jewel-nets, webnets
connect emotions, link shared meanings -
over continents, as I skype Dalits*.
Words translate, communicate, obfuscate,
challenge, overcome, transform.
* Ex-Untouchables
40 Words is part of an online word installation on the Arvon Blog. This is shortlisted piece from the Arvon/DXN Magazine competition 2008. Writers were invited to send 40 Words on Words to celebrate Arvon’s 40th birthday this year.
Words connect inside out and the outside to within. Like worker bees they can nourish or sting, so choose them well like quality chocolates, for you might have to eat them. And once they’re out, they can’t go back in.
When intimidated by the vast emptiness of the page, a word is a risk.
It denotes a life of contemplation, with no delusions of grandeur.
The immeasurable interim of the page is my host.
With words, I mark my space.
Words, meaningful, meaningless vibrations to the outer wor(l)ds, reverberations to the inner ones. Words abuse, confuse, profuse, they are tantamount, Tao mantras with silences. Atoms are the smallest unit of matter, words the smallest unit of speech.
40 Words is part of an online word installation on the Arvon Blog. This is shortlisted piece from the Arvon/DXN Magazine competition 2008. Writers were invited to send 40 Words on Words to celebrate Arvon’s 40th birthday this year.
For me, words are important for the way they engage the emotions - whether it’s through angry song lyrics or funny TV dialogue. As a writer, you hope your words will find their way out there to connect with someone.
Language stopped by laryngitis, thinking blocked by sinusitis, reading blurred by blefaritis, word-processing curbed by spondylitis…So grasp words to allay suffering: images of impermanence, cloudfree skies alleviating mind-pain; meditate on ‘Truth, Beauty’ and ‘Damn blasts’ and writings of Goethe.
40 Words is part of an online word installation on the Arvon Blog. This is shortlisted piece from the Arvon/DXN Magazine competition 2008. Writers were invited to send 40 Words on Words to celebrate Arvon’s 40th birthday this year.
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In 2000, having written two novels for children and having had one accepted by a small Scottish publisher, I registered for an Arvon course on Writing for Children in Moniak. I was terrified, as up to that point I had been writing in isolation and had no contact whatsoever with writers of any description. Indeed the last time I read anything out that I had written was as a schoolgirl. To cut a long story short, the Arvon week proved formative. Not only did I get the opportunity to talk to professional writers for the first time and pick their brains (the brilliant Cathy McPhail and Theresa Breslin) but I had an opportunity to read an extract of my embryonic novel for Young Adults to a critical audience and to receive impartial feedback and constructive criticism. Those days at Arvon utterly galvanised me and now, eight years on and twelve novels later I am a professional, full-time writer.
I would recommend an Arvon course for ANYONE who wants to write. In a nurturing and supportive environment, new writers can try their wings. Michael Morpurgo is right: there should be a thousand Arvons. Visit my website.
