MPA > MPA's Quotes

“I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.”
― Shirley Jackson

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Seven and a half million hearts were beating in close proximity in this heaving old city, and many, after all, would be aching far worse than his.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling

“The steel kettle shone, a slow furl of steam at its spout, vaguely suggestive of genie and lamp. Oh, grant me a wish, just the one.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The superhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“You got up, and you did something. And if trying to find a way when you don't even know you can get there isn't a small miracle; then I don't know what is.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I'm going to get there. I've begun to think we sit far more than we're supposed to." He smiled. "Why else would we have feet?”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“Life was very different when you walked through it.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.”
― Katherine Paterson

“It is not enough to simply teach children to read;
we have to give them something worth reading.
Something that will stretch their imaginations-
something that will help them make sense of their own lives
and encourage them to reach out toward people
whose lives are quite different from their own.”
― Katherine Paterson

“Let the wild rumpus start!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

“She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“You're not supposed to have iron bars around you - no one is supposed to have that. You're supposed to fall down hills and get lonely, and find your own food and get wet when it rains. That's what happens when you're alive.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Midnight Zoo

“More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.”
― Sonya Hartnett

“She doesn't understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings - they're helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“There's fire in my fingers. I burn everything I touch.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Surrender

“How can you know love, and lose it, and go on living without it, and not feel the loss forever?"

"You can't," Feather answered. "You feel the loss forever. But you put it in a corner of yourself, and bit by bit some of your sorrow changes into joy. And that's how you go on living.”
― Sonya Hartnett, The Ghost's Child

“How stupid it is that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Butterfly

“It is not asking much
one person
out of all the world.”
― Sonya Hartnett, Butterfly

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.”
― haruki murakami