Darrell Saunders > Darrell's Quotes

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles 'pon it instead," I said solemnly, "and frosting of white.”
― Jim Butcher, Small Favor

“Nice bird, asshole!”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it's only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don't love you, but your momma does and so do I.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
― Stephen King

“There are no monsters. Only people.”
― Ellie Marney, None Shall Sleep

“This thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.”
― George Gordon Byron

“Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.”
― Sue Grafton, M is for Malice

“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“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

“It was astonishing the number of useless things people found to do.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror in the Museum

“Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew:
Of wind I sang, a wind there came and in the branches blew.
Beyond the Sun, beyond the Moon, the foam was on the Sea,
And by the strand of Ilmarin there grew a Golden Tree.

Beneath the stars of Ever-eve in Eldamar it shone,
In Eldamar beside the walls of Elven Tirion.
There long the golden leaves have grown upon the branching years,
While here beyond the Sundering Seas now fall the Elven-tears.

O Lórien! Too long I have dwelt upon this Hither Shore
And in a fading crown have twined the golden elanor.
But if of ships I now would sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It was shivery and scant. Scared. Skint. But just around the edges it was still scintillant.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

“Go out in the early days of winter, after the first cold snap of the season. Find a pool of water with a sheet of ice across the top, still fresh and new and clear as glass. Near the shore the ice will hold you. Slide out farther. Farther. Eventually you'll find the place where the surface just barely bears your weight. There you will feel what I felt. The ice splinters under your feet. Look down and you can see the white cracks darting through the ice like mad, elaborate spiderwebs. It is perfectly silent, but you can feel the sudden sharp vibrations through the bottoms of your feet.
That is what happened when Denna smiled at me.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms . . . or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe