Pedro Gomes > Pedro's Quotes

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.”
― Remy de Gourmont

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.”
― Harlan Ellison

“The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. [...] There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal', the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally.”
― Harlan Ellison

“There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I read the story of Red Riding Hood today. I think the wolf was the most interesting character in it. Red Riding Hood was a stupid little thing so easily fooled.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“It's not where you take things from — it's where you take them to.”
― Jean-Luc Godard

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.”
― John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice: Volume I. The Foundations

“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”
― Dr. Seuss

“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back”
― Philip Larkin

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Toda mi vida modifica el libro que estoy leyendo.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”
― Charles Addams