I felt like this book flew above my head. I felt like there were levels that I wasn’t picking up on. I will definitely have to re-read this. This book was a puzzle. It was an enjoyable read, but hard.

What I got from this book was to not worry so much and to just trust the process and enjoy whatever you are doing. It tells a story about a writer struggling to write due to external pressures to “just publish” and worrying about not producing something good enough. And something about admiring a reader — who, if I’m remembering correctly — was reading the book he had yet to write and they were thoroughly enjoying the book. The writer just needed to remember what made them enjoy writing and not worry about the outcome.

It’s funny now that I am writing my notes AFTER having read Stillness is Key, how similar the takeaways are, yet conveyed in extremely different forms.

It starts off with two readers, one male, one female, who are reading a book that was mis-published where multiple books were combined. BUT the trippy part is that the book YOU are reading — i.e., “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” — actually feels this exact way! And you are actually reading the chapters they are reading!

p.141

What are you like, Other Reader? It is time for this book in the second person to address itself no longer to a general male you, perhaps brother and double of a hyprocrite I, but directly to you who appeared already in the second chapter as the Third Person necessary for the novel to be a novel, for something to happen between that male Second Person and the female Third, for something to take form, develop, or deteriorate according to the phases of human events. Or, rather, to follow the mental models through which we live our human events. Or, rather, to follow the mental models through which we attribute to human events the meanings that allow them to be lived.

This book so far has been careful to leave open to the Reader who is reading the possibility of identifying himself with the Reader who is read…

p.147 Or does the relationship between one Reader and the Other Reader remain that of two separate shells, which can communicate only through partial confrontations of two exclusive experiences?

p.169 Since I have become a slave laborer of writing, the pleasure of reading has finished for me.

p.170 At times I convince myself that the woman is reading my true book, the one I should have written long ago, but will never succeed in writing, that this book is there, word for word, that I can see it at the end of my spyglass but cannot read what is written in it, cannot know what was written by that me who I have not succeeded and will never succeed in being. It’s no use my sitting down again at my desk, straining to guess, to copy that true book of mine she is reading: whatever I may write will be false, a fake, compared to my true book, which no one except her will ever read.

p.171 If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes…Who would move this hand?

p.219 The body is an end and not a means!

p.254

If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image...of every book, I manage to read, no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust...Reading is a discontinuous and fragmentary operation... but at ever rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive emotion of previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impresssions, and do not find again those of before... there is progression...reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext...all the books I read are leading to a single book.

If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on a carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave — What story down there awaits its end? — he asks, anxious to hear the story.