T. E. Avery > T. E.'s Quotes

“You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream.”
― Les Brown, Live Your Dreams: Les Brown's Formula and Action Planner for Achieving Success and Happiness

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”
― Isak Dinesen

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.”
― Isak Dinesen

“People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of...”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

“When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves have ever scoured.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bernice Bobs Her Hair

“I have a handful of prayers that I pray all the time... One is that God will put my books into the right hands at the right times. I've prayed this prayer thousands of times, and God has answered it in dramatic fashion countless times. The right book in the right hands at the right time can save a marriage, avert a mistake, demand a decision, plant a seed, conceive a dream, solve a problem, and prompt a prayer. That is why I write. And that's why, for me, a book sold is not a book sold; a book sold is a prayer answered. I don't know the name and situation of every reader, but God does, and that's all that matters.”
― Mark Batterson, Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge

“Nolan Bushnell, the creator of the Atari video game system, once stated, ‘Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea, It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.”
― Mark Batterson, Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“I don't want to live, I want to love first and live incidentally.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“I love you, even if there isn’t any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“Prayer adds an element of surprise to your life that is more fun than a surprise party or surprise gift or surprise romance. In fact, prayer turns life into a party, into a gift, into a romance.”
― Mark Batterson, Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge

“So what do you do when you are stuck?

The first thing I do when I am stuck is pray. But I’m not talking about a quick, Help me Lord, Sunday’s a comin’ prayer. When I get stuck I get up from my desk to head for my closet. Literally. If I‘m at the office I go over to a corner that I have deemed my closet away from home. I get on my knees and remind God that this was not my idea, it was His…

None of this is new information to God…

Then I ask God to show me if there is something He wants to say to prepare me for what He wants me to communicate to our congregation. I surrender my ideas, my outline and my topic. Then I just stay in that quiet place until God quiets my heart…

Many times I will have a breakthrough thought or idea that brings clarity to my message. . .

Like you, I am simply a mouthpiece. Getting stuck is one way God keeps me ever conscious of that fact.”
― Andy Stanley, Communicating for a Change: Seven Keys to Irresistible Communication

“You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead.”
― Stan Laurel

“You can make anything by writing.”
― C.S. Lewis

“We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain