Marie > Marie's Quotes

“Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.”
― Alan Alda

“Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful: Yourself.”
― Alan Alda

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Women who work with animals hear this all the time: that their love for animals must arise out of a sublimated child-rearing urge. Ana's tired of the stereotype. She likes children just fine, but they're not the standard against which all other accomplishments should be measured. Caring for animals is worthwhile in and of itself, a vocation that need offer no apologies.”
― Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects

“The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues.”
― Alan Alda, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned

“There are some things (like first love and one’s first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“His young man's limbs, sleek in their dark male pride, seemed to disdain the covering offered them by the brief shorts and striped jersey. His body might have been naked, like his full, muscled throat, which rose, round and proud as the male organ of a flower, from the neck of his sweater.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“Her blank eyes burrowed through the fetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes, but voids sunk between two jutting pent-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rags of a futile grief were hung.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“Ye know, doan't ye, what it feels like when ye burn yer hand in takin' a cake out of the oven or wi'a match when ye're lightin' one of they godless cigarettes? Ay. It stings wi' a fearful pain, doan't it? And ye run away to clap a bit o' butter on it to take the pain away. Ah, but' (an impressive pause) 'there'll be no butter in hell!”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.”
― Toni Morrison

“I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.”
― Alan Alda

“[B]egin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in.”
― Alan Alda, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“I recently read a spec script by a young writer, and I could just tell that he was very mad at his characters and he had great contempt for his subject matter. But here's the thing: if the writer doesn't like his characters, why should the viewers?

At The Golden Girls, I was writing for these characters who were fifty years older than me. What did I know about being in my seventies? Absolutely nothing. But even being much younger, I could show compassion for these characters by empathizing with what they were going through. That's all you have to do: show compassion. My grandmother once looked in a mirror and said, "This is not what I really look like." I always thought that was such a sad and beautiful thing to have said. She was old, and she looked old. But inside, she felt young. I later borrowed that moment for The Golden Girls. You don't need to live through an experience, necessarily, to write about it with depth and compassion.”
― Mitch Hurwitz

“Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014

“And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this--letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable--but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014

“Every normal family is one tragedy away from complete implosion.”
― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility

“I'm more of a sprinter than a marathoner when it comes to many aspects of life. For example, when I'm running. Over short distances--up to two yards--I can run faster than cheap panty hose on an itchy porcupine. But over long distances, I'm not so impressive.

I try to compensate for my lack of long-distance endurance by having good form. I'm told that my running style is quite majestic. That's probably because I learned to run by watching nature films in which leopards chased frightened zebras. Now when I run, I open my eyes real wide and let my tongue slap the side of my face. If you saw it, you'd be saying, "That's very majestic." And then you'd run like a frightened zebra. That's why my homeowners association voted to ask me to do my jogging with a pillowcase over my head.”
― Scott Adams, The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century

“To be alive was to be disappointed. You tried and failed and kept on trying, never knowing whether you'd ever get what you wanted. But sometimes we get what we need.”
― Joan D. Vinge, Psion

“I will never forget what you did to me. I will never forgive it. I will never stop mourning what you stole from me. But I realize now I can't steal it back and I'm done spending every day trying to.”
― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility

“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good.”
― Elizabeth Edwards

“I wish I could have saved you," he says finally. And this is what it always comes back to. Salvation. Him saving me. Me saving him. Impossibilities, because there is no such thing, and it's not what we ever needed from each other anyway.”
― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“People like to say love is unconditional, but it's not, and even if it was unconditional, it's still never free. There's always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever and that makes you automatically responsible for their happiness because they won't be happy unless you are ... I just don't want that responsibility.”
― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility

“Don't worry. You're safe now. You've got nothing left to steal.”
― Joan D. Vinge, Catspaw