I went to the library. I looked at the magazines, at the pictures in them. One day I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio. I sat at a long mahogany table and began to read. All at once my world turned over. The sky fell in. The book held me. The tears came. My heart beat fast. I read until my eyes burned. I took the book home. I read another Anderson. I read and I read, and I was heartsick and lonely and in love with a book, many books, until it came naturally, and I sat there with a pencil and a long tablet, and tried to write, until I felt I could not go on because the words would not come as they did in Anderson, they only came like drops of blood from my heart. John Fante
About This Quote

In the book Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, there is a chapter called “The Great Room” where a man goes to his girlfriend’s house and sits in the long mahogany table. The guy says it is a very beautiful room. He says that one day he looked around and found himself in the midst of a great deal of emptiness. He felt a sense of sadness and was overwhelmed by a “large and lonely void” which he felt would never be filled.

He describes his feelings as “cut up” and tells his girlfriend that he feels like he is bleeding on their couch. However, the guy was able to find comfort in his girlfriend’s house because of her books. As he sat looking at the pictures on the wall, everything was changing for him. The pictures made him feel like he was sitting on top of one “great springtime mountain.” He said it felt like coming home because all of these pictures were seen before by him at some time or another when he lived with his mother.

The colors on the walls made him think of memories and times with his mom when he was young. The man continues to talk about how beautiful the room was and how it reminded him of something important about himself which makes him feel like “he went back to special days before all of this started” before he had even entered her home. Eventually, things start to get fuzzy for him as he feels like he is close to crying again but then remembers that there are books in her home too. It doesn’t take long for him to start talking about how beautiful they are also, especially when you compare them to the pictures on the wall because they are so alive and full of life with their own stories printed inside them. The man eventually tells his girlfriend that they are all alive in these books, they have stories about people who have died or have been killed or have lost loved ones or have been happy or have lived or have fallen in love or just done anything else possible since they were printed.

He describes how she will always be alive in these books because there are pages waiting for her story to be told just as they are waiting for hers, if she only comes back into his life to tell it… As soon as this man starts talking about how these books make him feel something about himself which makes it seem like if she comes back into his life she will know what

Source: Dreams From Bunker Hill

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More Quotes By John Fante
  1. Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.
  2. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there — the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.
  3. Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learnedto send myself off. Later there were no gardens.
  4. Because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time, they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return to the source, there is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of twoin a single body, a single soul, oh total...
  5. To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations.
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