Mark N. > Mark's Quotes

“I'm right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim...”
― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

“There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.”
― William S. Burroughs

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Men of few words are the best men."

(3.2.41)”
― William Shakespeare, Henry V

“Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done. ”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“I'm sorry. I didn't know you were coming or I'd have cleaned up a little more. My life, I mean, not just the apartment.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”
― Mark Twain

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

“This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves”
― Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem

“You can't just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things.”
― Stephen Chbosky

“You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”
― Nelson Algren, Nonconformity: Writing on Writing

“I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love: Ten Poems

“I want to know if you've touched the center of your own sorrow, if you've been opened by life's betrayals, or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer

“That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
― Raymond Carver

“When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn’t that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows. But it also devours.”
― Raymond Carver