2026 Reading Challenge

Esme > Esme's Quotes

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  • #1
    Diane Setterfield
    “All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.”
    ― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
    tags: books, character, characters, ideas, impact, reading
    825 likes

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  • #2
    “You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.”
    ― Joss Whedon
    tags: characters, fiction-writing, human-nature, journey, life-lessons, truth
    389 likes

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  • #3
    G.K. Chesterton
    “I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.”
    ― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America
    tags: books, characters, life
    372 likes

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  • #4
    Rainbow Rowell
    “You look like a protagonist.”
    ― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park
    tags: characters, protagonist
    139 likes

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  • #5
    Dean F. Wilson
    “When writing, there are some scenes that are emotionally overwhelming. They completely overcome the author, and only when they do this can they cause a similar reaction in the reader.

    Through this, the author gets to experience multiple lives. If a character's life flashes before their eyes, it flashes before the author's eyes too, and he or she remembers it as his or her own.

    With reading, we get to live other lives vicariously, and this is doubly so with writing. It is like a lucid dream, where we guide the outcome. In this, we don't merely write *about* a character -- we momentarily *become* them, and walk as they walk, think as they think, and do as they do. When we return to our own life, we might return a little shaken, likely a little stronger, hopefully a little wiser.

    What is certain is that we return better, because experiencing the lives of others makes us understand their aims and dreams, their fears and foils, the challenges and difficulties, and joys and triumphs, that they face. It helps us grow and empathise, and see all the little pictures that make up the bigger one we see from the omniscience of the narrator.”
    ― Dean F. Wilson
    tags: characters, emotion, experience, inspiration, life, reading, wisdom, writing
    133 likes

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  • #6
    John Scalzi
    “In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).”
    ― John Scalzi
    tags: characters, gay, glbt, literature, raising-kids, writing, ya
    128 likes

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  • #7
    Jo Walton
    “I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.”
    ― Jo Walton, Among Others
    tags: books, characters
    98 likes

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  • #8
    Virginia Woolf
    “clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.”
    ― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
    tags: characters, isolation, loneliness, personality, solitude
    95 likes

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  • #9
    Joe Hill
    “I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.”
    ― Joe Hill, Horns
    tags: authors, characters, loss-of-faith, love, women
    71 likes

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  • #10
    Dodie Smith
    “But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.”
    ― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
    tags: characters, jane-austen, marriage
    54 likes

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  • #11
    Amit Kalantri
    “Politeness is the first thing people lose once they get the power.”
    ― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
    tags: adage, advertisement, alliterations, amit-kalantri, amit-kalantri-quotes, amit-kalantri-writer, ascendancy, authority, blog, blogging, book-writing, catch-lines, catchphrases, characters, chivalry, civility, command, considerateness, consideration, control, courtesy, creative-writing, cultivation, deference, diplomacy, discretion, dominance, domination, dominion, essay, gallantry, gentility, good-breeding, good-manners, grace, grasp, hold, influence, inspirational, jurisdiction, knowledge, leverage, manners, mastery, motivational, movie, movie-dialogue, novel-writing, people, philosophy, polite, politeness, power, proverbs, public-speaking, punchline, quotes, respect, rhetoric, rule, sayings, script, script-writing, scriptwriting, slogans, social-networking, soft-skills, sovereignty, speech, speechwriting, story, supremacy, sway, tactfulness, tag-lines, thoughtfulness, urbanity-tact, weight, wisdom, wit, witty, writing
    80 likes

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  • #12
    Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
    “When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
    ― Kurt Vonnegut
    tags: characters, creative-writing, life, meaningless, meaninglessness, modern-life, paralyzed, water, write, writing
    41 likes

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  • #13
    Christie Silvers
    “Just me, my music, and the voices in my head.”
    ― Christie Silvers
    tags: characters, fun, true, writers-on-writing
    26 likes

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  • #14
    Amit Kalantri
    “Great losses are great lessons.”
    ― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
    tags: adage, advertisement, alliterations, amit-kalantri, amit-kalantri-quotes, amit-kalantri-writer, blog, blogging, book-writing, bounce-back, catch-lines, catchphrases, characters, creative-writing, essay, experience, hope, inspirational, knowledge, learning-from-mistakes, lesson, loss, mistakes, motivational, movie, movie-dialogue, novel-writing, philosophy, profit, proverbs, public-speaking, punchline, quotes, rhetoric, script, script-writing, scriptwriting, setback, slogans, social-networking, speech, speechwriting, story, success, tag-lines, wisdom, writing
    37 likes

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  • #15
    Shannon L. Alder
    “When you don’t have honesty in love then there is no communication. Honesty is improvisation of the heart; anything less is a well thought out and rehearsed script.”
    ― Shannon L. Alder
    tags: anxiety, characters, conflict, delusion, dishonest, fake, fear, games, heart-felt, honesty, improvisation, liars, lies, love, make-believe, manipulation, mind-games, perspective, plans, preplanned, real, rehearsed, relationships, romance, scripted, secrets
    34 likes



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Tags From Esme’s Quotes

books
character
characters
ideas
impact
reading
fiction-writing
human-nature
journey
life-lessons
truth
life
protagonist
emotion
experience
inspiration
wisdom
writing
gay
glbt
literature
raising-kids
ya
isolation
loneliness
personality
solitude
authors
loss-of-faith
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alliterations
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