Jan Priddy > Jan's Quotes

“You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.”
― Denise Levertov

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I've always wanted not to give a fuck. While crying helplessly into my pillow for no good reason, I would often fantasize that maybe someday I could be one of those stoic badasses whose emotions are mostly comprised of rock music and not being afraid of things.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

“Be you writer or reader, it is very pleasant to run away in a book.”
― Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain

“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas

“She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said.
"How do you have the time?" he asked, gobsmacked.
She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in reflective surfaces? I am reading!
"I don't know," she said, shrugging.”
― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“He wore his loneliness like his scar.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, The Weight of Feathers

“The longer I am a writer--so long now that my writing finger is periodically numb--the better I understand what writing is; what its function is; what it is supposed to do. I learn that the writer's pen is a microphone held up to the mouths of ancestors and even stones of long ago. That once given permission by the writer--a fool, and so why should one fear?--horses, dogs, rivers, and, yes, chickens can step forward and expound on their lives. The magic of this is not so much in the power of the microphone as in the ability of the nonhuman object or animal to BE and the human animal to PERCEIVE ITS BEING.”
― Alice Walker, Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987

“It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.”
― Laura McBride, We Are Called to Rise

“Rejection sucks. It sucks every time, whether it's a big suck or a little suck. But it's part of the process. It's part of being a writer. It's a badge that says 'I'm serious about this, and I'm sending out my work.”
― Allison K. Williams, Get Published in Literary Magazines: The Indispensable Guide to Preparing, Submitting and Writing Better

“What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.”
― Allison K. Williams, Get Published in Literary Magazines: The Indispensable Guide to Preparing, Submitting and Writing Better

“The way of Friends is to think quietly and to listen. We ask the question, we consider how the answer is made by different people, we ask again, answer again, change our minds; we reach an understanding. The Meeting evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, not by the weight of the majority, but by the capacity of individual human beings to comprehend one another.”
― Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren't continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along.”
― Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

“He thumbed quickly through the ledger and said, “When people see a cripple walking down the street, leaning on his cane, what do they feel?” Wylan looked away. People always did when Kaz talked about his limp, as if he didn’t know what he was or how the world saw him. “They feel pity. Now, what do they think when they see me coming?”
Wylan’s mouth quirked up at the corner. “They think they’d better cross the street.”
Kaz tossed the ledger back in the safe. “You’re not weak because you can’t read. You’re weak because you’re afraid of people seeing your weakness. You’re letting shame decide who you are.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“If you want to really relax sometime, just fall to rock bottom and you'll be a happy man. Most all troubles come from having standards.”
― Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

“Do you know a cure for me?"

"Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water."

"Salt water?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.”
― James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.”
― Aldous Huxley

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.”
― Marlon James

“All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“What keeps a poor child in Appalachia poor is not what keeps a poor child in Chicago poor—even if from a distance, the outcomes look the same. And what keeps an able-bodied black woman poor is not what keeps a disabled white man poor, even if the outcomes look the same.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race