A Horse at Night Quotes

“To be in favor of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It’s not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood. Who are you when you are not a friend, a partner, a lover, a sibling, a parent, a child? When no one is with you, what do you do, and do you do it differently than if someone was there? It’s hard to see someone fully when another person is always attached to them. More importantly, it’s hard for us to see our own selves if we’re not ever alone.”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“When I start writing a new story, I often begin with setting. Before plot, before dialogue, before anything else, I begin to see where a story will take place, and then I hear the narrative voice, which means that character is not far behind. Lately I've been thinking a lot about landscape painting and literature, and perhaps as an extension of this I have started to think through this idea of character and landscape as similar things, or at least as intimates, co-dependent.”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“Sometimes I trick myself when writing in my notebook; sometimes I end up working on the novel after all, in those pages. And that is the best reason to return to it, that it brings me closer to something I haven't otherwise been able to get to, or that can't get to me. I want to go further into my writing, into my thinking. 'And do I?”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“For me, fiction is a space of plainness and excess.”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“I want to leave a chain of images that remain in the reader's mind. I want to write what heightened experience feels like.”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“Female solitude is weighted with a particular power in literature.”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“Perhaps solitude is a practice as much as an instinct, its pleasures very much contextual. Sometimes being alone is terrible.”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“she began to keep a journal because she saw that life had mystical qualities”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“What do I do when my friendships turn “bad,” I who pride myself on the deep, loving friendships I have? Because this is a continuum we are talking about, maybe it is inevitable that some friends will feel badly toward each other in the end, or become too changed to go on. The distance can’t be crossed anymore; it is too great. And the memory of your former closeness will be comforting, or you will feel grief. Anything is possible. What does it mean to know someone? What does it mean to be close, or to be distant? And is there a part of you that can still be close in the midst of distance?”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing