Elsbeth Magilton > Elsbeth's Quotes

“I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.”
― Stephen Greenblatt

“I'm fine,' lied Richard bravely, to no one in particular.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the final sanctuary of the terminally inept.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Expect us when you see us.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Don't confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Not forever-after, for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Myths are compost. They begin as religions, the most deeply held of beliefs, or as the stories that accrete to religions as they grow.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Cruelty is cheap, easy, and chickenshit." That's also a touchstone of my spiritual beliefs.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.”
― Anne Lamott

“When we're suffering, may of us are better at causing pain than feeling it. We spread hurt rather than let it inside.”
― Brene Brown, Braving the Wilderness

“Perfectionism sucks the air out of your uniqueness and leaves you empty, away from who you could become.”
― Darryl Stewart Wellness

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”
― Isaac Asimov

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them. Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong.”
― Neil Gaiman

“We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. We have an obligation to use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside. We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

“I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

“We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“Some of our old ways are better forgotten, but not all of them.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, Zahrah the Windseeker

“You don't know when you're twenty-three.
You don't know what it really means to crawl into someone else's life and stay there. You can't see all the ways you're going to get tangled, how you're going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten - in fifteen. When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems.
She didn't know at twenty-three.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Landline

“So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it –

– we all get to dream.”
― N.K. Jemisin

“...and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“There is a strange emptiness to life without myths.

I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there.

I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore.

These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.”
― N.K. Jemisin

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”
― Terry Pratchett

“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