Alexa > Alexa's Quotes

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“All happiness depends on courage and work.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“For man is essentially alone, and one should pity him and love him and grieve with him.”
― Halldór Laxness

“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.”
― Mark Twain

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

“A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”
― Maurice Sendak

“Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Omit needless words.”
― William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style; How to Speak and Write Correctly

“I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.”
― Margaret Walker

“I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money - I think that can be a burden - I’m greedy for an exciting life.”
― David Hockney

“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”
― Albert Einstein

“In the world I am
Always a stranger
I do not understand its language
It does not understand my silence”
― Bei Dao

“You can either be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It all depends on how you view your life.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“You drown not by falling in the river but by staying submerged in it.”
― Paulo Coelho

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.”
― Eugene Field

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“It isn't ever delicate to live.”
― Kay Ryan

“It had helped to keep her sane, that writing. Then, when time had begun again and real people had entered it, she'd abandoned it here. Now it's a whisper from the past.

Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?”
― Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam

“Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
― Walker Evans

“Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.”
― Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

“Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you're no longer talking about reality. You might think that --by following language and a logic that appears consistent-- you're able to exclude that aspect of reality, but it will always be lying in wait for you, ready to take its revenge.”
― Murakami, Haruki

“My life has a superb cast, but I cannot figure out the plot.”
― Ashleigh Brilliant

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird