Ken West > Ken's Quotes

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.”
― Mary Higgins Clark

“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling: Captains Courageous - Kim

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

“There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.

— Great Expectations (1998) directed by Alfonso Cuarón”
― Mitch Glazer

“Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell.”
― Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot

“Things worth telling - take time”
― Nicholas Denmon

“For me, stories are like WD-40 for the brain: they keep all the wheels and gears and clicky-things running smoothly. Without them, cognitive function becomes a bore.”
― The Inkslinger

“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.”
― Ayn Rand

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”
― Ayn Rand

“It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.”
― Sinclair Lewis

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
― James Waterman Wise

“He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
― George Orwell

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Notas: Unzeitgemäße Gedanken

“Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from
indifference toward the unique values which created it.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a Un Texto Implicito: Obra Completa