Mary Aalgaard > Mary's Quotes

“Work hard, do the best you can, don't ever lose faith in yourself and take no notice of what other people say about you.”
― Noel Coward

“Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.”
― Neil Gaiman, Signal to Noise

“What if nobody showed up at Armageddon?”
― C R Strahan

“Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.”
― Jim Butcher, Death Masks

“CHEERS, CARTER. At least you have the sense to hand me the microphone for important things.
Honestly, he drones on and on about his plans for the Apocalypse, but he makes no plans at all for the school dance. My brother's priorities are severely skewed.

Sadie Kane”
― Rick Riordan

“If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.”
― James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

“I think this is irresponsible preaching and very dangerous, and especially when it is slanted toward children, I think it's totally irresponsible, because I see nothing biblical that points up to our being in the last days, and I just think it's an outrageous thing to do, and a lot of people are making a living—they've been making a living for 2,000 years—preaching that we're in the last days.”
― Charles M. Schulz, Charles M. Schulz: Conversations

“On the day the world is blown up, the playwright whose show opened the night before will be leafing past the news section of the Times to find his review--as he ascends through the stratosphere, oblivious.”
― Arthur Miller, Salesman in Beijing

“How would you rather die?" she snapped. "Hiding under your bed or riding Thunder Mountain?”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!”
― Rainbow Rowell , Attachments

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
― Albert Camus

“My mother used to tell me, every time we were watching Cinderella, that Cinderella had the best attitude and that I should strive to be just like her. Later when I grew up, I resented my mother for teaching me that way, as I saw it as the reason why I often felt preyed on by people who were much more like the ugly stepsisters. But now, all of a sudden, I’ve realized that what my mom meant was that no matter how ugly people can be to you, no matter how rough they treat you, no matter how much their actions tempt you to become your worst— you should overcome them by never letting them steal your gentleness. People only win when they are able to take away your gentleness, your sweetness. But if you remember that you’re a princess, and they’re just not, at the end of the day you win! Still, my mom should have pointed me in the direction of Belle from Beauty and the Beast. Cinderella is fine, but had she taught me that Belle was the best way to be, I would have probably never grown to resent that. Belle always retained her gentleness but she could still beat up a pack of wolves at the same time and that’s the kind of princess I wanted to be like! Not to mention she loved books!”
― C. JoyBell C.

“It is winter now,
and the roses are blooming again,
their petals bright against the snow.
My father died last April;
my sisters no longer write,
except at the turning of the year,
content with their fine houses
and their grandchildren.
Beast and I
putter in the gardens
and walk slowly on the forest paths.

[from the poem, Beauty and the Beast: An Anniversary]”
― Jane Yolen

“Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.”
― Sue Grafton, M is for Malice

“You can’t save others from themselves because those who make a perpetual muddle of their lives don’t appreciate your interfering with the drama they’ve created. They want your poor-sweet-baby sympathy, but they don’t want to change.”
― Sue Grafton, T is for Trespass

“Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.”
― Sue Grafton

“Why do I need TV when I have forty-eight apartment windows to watch across the vacant lot, and a sliver of Lake Erie? I've seen history out this window. So much. I was four when we moved here in 1919. The fruit-sellers' carts and coal wagons were pulled down the street by horses back then. I used to stand just here and watch the coal brought up by the handsome lad from Groza, the village my parents were born in. Gibb Street was mainly Rumanians back then. It was "Adio" - "Good-bye"- in all the shops when you left. Then the Rumanians started leaving. They weren't the first, or the last. This has always been a working-class neighborhood. It's like a cheap hotel - you stay until you've got enough money to leave.”
― Paul Fleischman, Seedfolks

“Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Matchmaker

“And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing to find out ‘what happens next’ … the feeling that keeps you up half the night. The feeling that comes before the plot’s been learned.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay

“Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.”
― Melinda Haynes