Sharon Bender > Sharon's Quotes

“The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Don't wait for her. Start alone.”
― Roger Ebert

“I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.”
― Beatrix Potter

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

“Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.”
― Anne Michaels

“Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.”
― Shawn Slovo, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“I opened my mouth to tell her that nothing could kill me, not now, but she said, 'Not kill you. Destroy you. Dissolve you. You wouldn't die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that's not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so there wouldn't be anything left that would think of itself as an "I." No point of view any longer, because you'd be an infinite sequence of views and points...”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades.”
― Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“This book is against the idea of “finding” an audience and for the idea of writing toward the audience whose expectations matter to you.”
― Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

“When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet