Raissa > Raissa's Quotes

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“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.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Charlotte Gray

“....You know,” he mused, “there are many ways to end a love story. There are many possible ways we can imagine a happy ending. But what we really mean by a happy ending, strangely enough, is a beginning. The moment that it becomes possible for the relationship to begin. For, you know, they all end the same way. One will leave the other. Whether they want to or not.” Love Among the Geeks”
― Raissa Rivera Falgui

“I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“We never sit anything out. We are cups, quietly and constantly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.

What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don’t force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Know all the Questions, but not the Answers
Look for the Different, instead of the Same
Never Walk where there's room for Running
Don't do anything that can't be a Game”
― Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Changeling

“It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany

“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

“If your head tells you one thing and your heart tells you another ,before you do anything,you should first decide whether you have a better head or a better heart.”
― Marilyn Vos Savant

“It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that whatever you say to them, they always purr.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

“I wish I could manage to be glad!" the Queen said. "Only I never can remember the rule. You must be very happy, living in this wood, and being glad whenever you like!”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

“Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

“I am what I am. I would tell you what you want to know if I could, for you have been kind to me. But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“...no cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“The most professional curse ever snarled or croaked or thundered can have no effect on a pure heart.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“But I'm always dreaming, even when I'm awake; it is never finished.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Unicorns are not to be forgiven." The magician felt himself growing giddy with jealousy, not only of the touch but of something like a secret that was moving between Molly and the unicorn. "Unicorns are for beginnings," he said, "for innocence and purity, for newness. Unicorns are for young girls."

Molly was stroking the unicorn's throat as timidly as though she were blind. She dried her grimy tears on the white mane. "You don't know much about unicorns," she said.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Scientist though I am, I do still have romantic cells in my body. That, thankfully, is something even radioactive or chemical fallout could not kill--the ability of humans to feel and hope and love, whatever defects their genes may be infected with.”
― Raissa Rivera Falgui, Virtual Centre and other science fiction stories

“Why was it that as people let go of their belief in the supernatural they still continued to hang on to the negative myths yet quickly discarded the positive? Nobody saw her as a tree spirit or sky maiden now as they did hundreds of years ago, Nobody even saw her as an angel, maybe because they saw her at night and despite all the lighting in the modern world, the fear of the night persisted.”
― Raissa Rivera Falgui, Virtual Centre and other science fiction stories

“You can not make someone love you. You can not be thin enough or white enough or famous enough. The choice is entirely the other person's. Then again, you might try hypnosis.”
― Jessica Zafra, Chicken Pox for the Soul

“One of the advantages of having an imaginary boyfriend is that he exists only for you, therefore he can not be stolen. The disadvantage is that you can not introduce him to your friends.”
― Jessica Zafra, Chicken Pox for the Soul