Quotes
Here are a few quotes that inspire and/or amuse me.
That’s all any of us want, to find a nice person to hang out with until we drop dead.
–Lorelai Gilmore
“There’s a kind of a warp at work in the world.” “A warp?” “You probably don’t know this, but that’s how we have three dimensions. Because of the warp. If you want everything to be nice and straight all the time, then go live in a world made with a triangular ruler.”
–from Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
He had learned, also, when giving his own name to omit the “Professor.” Learning annoyed people, and formality was a form of pulling rank. This was the country of the diminutive.
–from Salman Rushdie’s Fury
Love isn’t a steadfast dog at all; love is more like a pygmy mouse lemur…a tiny, jittery primate with eyes that are permanently peeled open in fear…. imagine a miniature Don Knotts or Steve Buscemi wearing a fur coat… it has been squeezed so hard that all its stuffing has been pushed up into an oversized head and its eyes are now popping out in overflow. The lemur looks so vulnerable that one cannot help but worry that a predator might swoop in at any instant to snatch it away.
–from Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle
A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds.
–Orhan Pamuk in My Name is Red
You cannot stare evil in the face; it has no face. It has no body, no bones, no blood. Any attempt to describe it ends in glibness and self-delusion. Maybe, I thought, this is why Christians invented the devil and Monster investigators invented a satanic sect. They both were, as the poem goes, “some kind of solution.”
–Douglas Preston in The Monster of Florence
Love isn’t brains, children, it’s blood. Blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.
–Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
“We’ve been lucky,” I said. “We’ve been able to live by what we love. And to live painting, as we have, wherever we have, is to live passion and imagination and connection and adoration, all the best of life–to be more alive than the rest.”
–Artemisia in The Passion of Artimesia by Susan Vreeland.
The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it.
–Dr. Horrible
Even in the darkness, every color can be found. And every day of rain brings water flowing to things growing in the ground.
–Penny, in Dr. Horrible
It may not feel too classy, begging just to eat. But you know who does that? Lassie. And she always gets a treat.
–Captain Hammer, Corporate Tool, in Dr. Horrible
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness… It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
–the character of “celebrated murderess,” Grace Marks in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace
Where men can’t live gods fare no better.
–Cormac McCarthy in The Road
No lists of things to be done. The day is providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.
–Cormac McCarthy in The Road
The Devil may take the reckless, but the good will surely die of boredom.
–Alessandra in The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant
I will make trophies of their spines.
–Illyria, in Angel Season Five
Every day is another chance to turn it all around.
–Penelope Cruz’s character in Vanilla Sky
The only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
–Waddington, in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
–W. Somerset Maugham
Fear is a friend who’s misunderstood.
–John Mayer
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.
–Robert Browning in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”
Buffy:
Sarcasm accomplishes nothing, Giles.Giles:
It’s sort of an end in itself.
–from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
We can choose. Happiness is an option.
–from Pet Shop Boys, Nightlife
Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith.
–St. Francis of Assisi
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
–Faber, in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.
–Faber, in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.
–Faber, in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and they turn on you.
–Beatty, in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
–Abraham Lincoln
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.
–Aldous Huxley
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest her or his patients in the care of the human frame, in a proper diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.
–Thomas Alva Edison
Whenever I’m feeling sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.
–Barney, on How I Met Your Mother
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
–Aldous Huxley
You have to do it. You have to run or write or sit. No one can do it for you… I try to tell as much as I can so I can help. It doesn’t help. We have to do it. We help ourselves, and then we know something we can’t give away.
–Natalie Goldberg
History is fiction agreed upon.
–Napoleon
In a world full of people, only some want to fly. Isn’t that crazy?
–Seal
But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion.
–From The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
I’m in it for the chocolate.
–Jodi Meadows, speaking of commercialized holidays
If you condense everything I’ve ever done in my whole life down into one day, it doesn’t look too bad.
–George Costanza
Everybody else is working for the weekend, but I’m working for the week.
–Michael Scott
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
–John Cage
Even if a book doesn’t sell, it’s not wasted time if you learned how to be a better writer. It’s not the most productive time maybe, but it’s NOT wasted. Writing is not an efficiency art. You’re not Henry Ford and your book isn’t coming off an assembly line.
They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.
–from A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
But now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.
–from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going too fast – you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.
–Eddie Cantor
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
–Aldous Huxley
The professional writes when sick, when everybody’s favorite TV show is on, when his or her friends are partying. The professional submits to respected markets and accept rejections as marks of progress, not as stupidity on the part of the editors… the professional always wins, even if the work never gets published. The professional is never finished, even if the work gets published.
–Scott Nicholson for Storytellers Unplugged
He who has no touch of the muse’s madness in his soul approaches the door believing he will be allowed into the temple by virtue of his Art; but he and his poetry are not admitted; he is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.
–Plato (paraphrased in Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand)
What city experiences could be more seductive than sitting in the gardens of Notre-Dame beneath the drifting cherry blossom, strolling along the riverside quais on a summer evening, sipping coffee and cognac in the early hours to the sound of the blues, or exploring the ancient alleyways and cobbled lanes of the Latin Quarter and Montmartre? Paris has no problem living up to the painted images and movie myths with which we’re all familiar.
–from The Rough Guide to Paris
You can’t straighten up during writing then hunch back down when you let go of the pen. Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth, and it spreads out from the page into all of our life.
–Natalie Goldberg
Impossible things happen. When they do happen, most people just deal with it. Today, like every day, roughly five thousand people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things, and not one of them will refuse to believe the evidence of their senses. Most of them will say the equivalent, in their own language, of “Funny old world, isn’t it?” and just keep going.
–from Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
–Wendell Berry
Only in stories do things make sense.
–from Fudoki by Kij Johnson
West of the Mississippi it’s a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
–F. Scott Fitzgerald
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
–Erica Jong
Write first, worry later.
–Rae Dawn Carson
Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake…it is one of the few places that tolerate human nature with all its faults.
–Erica Jong, in What Do Women Want?
It ain’t pretty when the pretty leaves you.
–J.D. Fortune
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.
–from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
He not busy being born is busy dying.
–Bob Dylan
We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions.
–Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible
I’m not afraid to fall; it means I climbed up high.
–Superchick
All things truly wicked start from innocence.
–Ernest Hemingway
Don’t worry about your talent or capability: that will grow as you practice… when you learn to trust your voice… you can have the confidence that you will gradually acquire the technique and craft you need.
–from Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
Yet each man kills the thing he loves, by each let this be heard, some do it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word, the coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.
–from The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde
Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
–Mahatma Gandhi
If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.
–Stephen King
Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.
–Virginia Woolf
All good books have one thing in common—they are truer than if they had really happened.
–Ernest Hemingway
A dog starved at his master’s gate predicts the ruin of the state.
–William Blake
It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
–Ernest Hemingway
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
–Martin Luther King, Jr
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
–E.L.Doctorow
Liberty is a chore … and a long-distance race, quite solitary, quite exhausting.
–Albert Camus
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
–Benjamin Franklin