Amanda Patterson > Amanda's Quotes

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Poirot," I said. "I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”
― Agatha Christie, Peril at End House

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“You build your world around someone, and then what happens when he disappears? Where do you go- into pieces, into atoms, into the arms of another man? You go shopping, you cook dinner, you work odd hours, you make love to someone else on June nights. But you're not really there, you're someplace else where there is blue sky and a road you don't recognize. If you squint your eyes, you think you see him, in the shadows, beyond the trees. You always imagine that you see him, but he's never there. It's only his spirit, that's what's there beneath the bed when you kiss your husband, there when you send your daughter off to school. It's in your coffee cup, your bathwater, your tears. Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you, and a man who swears he'll love you forever isn't finished with you until he's done.”
― Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“People who don't read are brutes.”
― Eugene Ionesco

“I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.”
― Don DeLillo, Valparaiso

“I wish you could have been there for the sun & the rain & the long, hard hills. For the sound of a thousand conversations scattered along the road. For the people laughing & crying & remembering at the end. But, mainly, I wish you could have been there.”
― Brian Andreas

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Time Does Not Bring Relief

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.”
― Stephen King

“Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.”
― Anne Sexton

“They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments line up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense.”
― E.E Cummings

“I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don’t understand you at all stick around.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“I love you. I am who I am because of you. You are every reason, every hope, and every dream I've ever had, and no matter what happens to us in the future, everyday we are together is the greatest day of my life. I will always be yours. ”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard."

(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)”
― David McCullough

“The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.”
― Albert Camus

“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst had been vaporized by the sheer shock of the new.”
― Belinda Bauer, Rubbernecker