Bellkeyce > Bellkeyce's Quotes

“The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.”
― Goethe

“Sit down every day and DO IT. Writing is a self-taught craft; the more you work at it, the more skilled you become. And when you're not writing, READ.”
― Lois Duncan

“We are the wise.
Do not envy us—
We who are too wise to draw near
the fire
Lest we get burned;
We who are too wise to love
Lest love should vanish and we be
hurt.
We are the wise.
Do not envy us our wisdom—
We who are too wise to live
Lest we should die.”
― Lois Duncan, Trapped: Cages of Mind and Body

“Why are murder mysteries so popular? There's a 3-part "formula" (if you want to call it that) for a genre novel: (1) Someone the reader likes and relates to (2) overcomes increasingly difficult obstacles (3) to reach an important goal. The more important the goal, the stronger the novel. And the most important goal that any of us have is survival. That's why murder mysteries are more gripping than a story titled "Who Stole My TV Set.”
― Lois Duncan

“A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“I delight in what I fear.”
― Shirley Jackson

“I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there.”
― Shirley Jackson

“In the country of the story the writer is king.”
― Shirley Jackson, Come Along With Me

“No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one's childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech.”
― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Time is
Too Slow for those who Wait,
Too Swift for those who Fear,
Too Long for those who Grieve,
Too Short for those who Rejoice;
But for those who Love,
Time is not.”
― Henry van Dyke, Music and Other Poems

“If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“We know what we are, but not what we may be.”
― William Shakespeare

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.”
― William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me,
That I must love a loathed enemy.”
― William Shakespeare

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

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet