Chip Howell > Chip's Quotes

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.”
― China Miéville, The Scar

“A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.”
― Maya Angelou

“Bob Marley isn't my name. I don't even know my name yet.”
― Bob Marley

“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words — if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night — do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match?”
― C.J. Cherryh

“Watch out for a man whose enemies keep disappearing.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Deceiver

“Trouble didn’t just come in threes: it gathered passengers as it went, and crashed nastily into bystanders.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Forge of Heaven

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."

[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

“Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse