"May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery"
About this Quote
Davies delivers his advice like a well-mannered house call: knock first, lower your voice, then slip the patient something potent. The opening - "May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence?" - is not throat-clearing. It’s a strategy. Misery is touchy, prideful, easily offended by solutions. By preemptively apologizing, he refuses the role of guru and sidesteps the modern allergy to being told what to do. The politeness is a Trojan horse for urgency.
Then the imperative lands: "Write it down". The repetition tightens the screw. This isn’t a vague endorsement of self-expression; it’s a concrete act, almost clerical. Davies implies that pain becomes less omnipotent when it’s forced into sentences, when it has to queue up behind grammar and submit to sequence. On the page, emotion stops being weather and starts being evidence.
The subtext is novelistic faith in form: that narrative is not decoration but an instrument. Davies, a novelist steeped in psychology and the private theatrics of conscience, suggests that writing doesn’t cure misery so much as repositions it. You move from being purely afflicted to being, even briefly, an observer - the person who can name, arrange, and therefore endure.
"Sometimes" is the crucial humility. He doesn’t promise transformation, only leverage. In that modesty is a quiet respect for suffering: not romanticized, not solved, but made a little more legible - which, in real life, is often the first genuine mercy.
Then the imperative lands: "Write it down". The repetition tightens the screw. This isn’t a vague endorsement of self-expression; it’s a concrete act, almost clerical. Davies implies that pain becomes less omnipotent when it’s forced into sentences, when it has to queue up behind grammar and submit to sequence. On the page, emotion stops being weather and starts being evidence.
The subtext is novelistic faith in form: that narrative is not decoration but an instrument. Davies, a novelist steeped in psychology and the private theatrics of conscience, suggests that writing doesn’t cure misery so much as repositions it. You move from being purely afflicted to being, even briefly, an observer - the person who can name, arrange, and therefore endure.
"Sometimes" is the crucial humility. He doesn’t promise transformation, only leverage. In that modesty is a quiet respect for suffering: not romanticized, not solved, but made a little more legible - which, in real life, is often the first genuine mercy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Care |
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