Thank you for joining me on the Where Angels Can’t Follow blog tour. I have always loved books that had unique chapter headings. As an author, when I write the chapters out, they are usually just numbers at first. I don’t want to get bogged down in the details when a story still has to be written. But I love seeing a handful of words an author chooses to represent a chapter. (For example, J.K. Rowling’s “The Boy Who Lived”) One of the most creative options I have seen recently was in a Karen Marie Moning book. Her main character was listening to music throughout the story, and her chapter headings were relevant lyrics.
I never dreamt that I something so beautifully relevant to my novel would pop into my mind. But I did some digging on famous sculptors when my main character was compelled to carve an angel. And who better to discuss carving angels than the major artists of the Renaissance? I got chills when I read Michelangelo’s quotes. “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” It was so close to what filled my character’s mind that I felt like Michelangelo was reaching through time and offering me this gift. And the gifts kept coming. He also said, “It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.”
I knew then that my readers had to experience the quotes that lined up with the chapters in my book. Each chapter has a quote from a different artist. (You should know that I consider anyone being creative an artist, so there are authors, painters, sculptors, photographers—artists of many kinds—in the list.) Here are the 24 quotes that made the cut because they fit Where Angels Can’t Follow so well.
1. “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”—Michelangelo
2. “When it comes to art, it’s important not to hide the madness.”—Atticus
3. “When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another.”—Salvador Dali
4. “It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.”—Michelangelo
5. “No artist tolerates reality.”—Nietzsche
6. “And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”—Nietzsche
7. “I would rather die of passion than of boredom.”—Vincent van Gogh8. “I dream my painting, then I paint my dream.”—Vincent van Gogh
9. “A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”—Salvador Dali
10. “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”—Picasso
11. “I put my heart and my soul into my work and have lost my mind in the process.”—Vincent van Gogh
12. “Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”—Picasso
13. “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”—Edgar Degas
14. “We are all broken. That’s how the light gets in.”—Ernest Hemingway
15. “In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
16. “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”—Pablo Picasso
17. “To create one’s own world takes courage.”—Georgia O’Keefe
18. “The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”—Michelangelo
19. “Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” —Twyla Tharp
20. “The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.”—Alberto Giacometti
21. “Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.”—Michelangelo
22. “I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”—Edgar Allen Poe
23. “Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”—Neil Gaiman
24. “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”—Andy Warhol
It all started with an inexplicable slab of marble.
And now I can’t get her out of my head. It’s more than inspiration. It’s compulsion.
I see her in my dreams. And I wake up covered in marble dust, her statue more complete in front of me.
I can’t stop sculpting, and I can’t save the angel girl.
Now iconoclasts, a quartet of archangels, and a voodoo queen—along with the plague of little old ladies running my life—are all far too interested in the outcome.
I miss normal New Orleans. (Yeah, I said it.)
But there’s no going back until I free her and get the literal heavenly host out of my life. And maybe there’s no going back then.
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As a devoted bibliophile and die-hard sci-fi/fantasy fan, few of Jessi’s friends were surprised when she began writing her own novels. After completing her Master’s in English, she briefly taught college courses until she realized adjuncting is madness. After a brief timeout to raise nerdlings, Jessi wrote Iron Shards. And her latest books–Where Angels Can’t Follow and Hell and High Water—will be released this fall. In her free time, Jessi explores and maps caves in the Southeastern United States and, of course, catches up on the latest good reads.
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