Theresa F. > Theresa's Quotes

“If you have a tendency to find yourself in MacGyveresque situations, go ahead and choose a synthetic rope to craft with. I don't want you cursing my name as you hang from a cliff by your swiftly fraying Monkey's Fist necklace.”
― Maura Madden, Crafternoon: A Guide to Getting Artsy and Crafty with Your Friends All Year Long

“Every hair metal band in the 1980s followed a very simple, yet effective marketing plan: first release an ear-shattering, head-banging metal song to bring in the guys, then follow it up with a sensitive power ballad to bring in the ladies. Well, in the world of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, He-Man was the head-banging metal song and She-Ra was the power ballad”
― Jensen Karp, Just Can't Get Enough: Toys, Games, and Other Stuff from the 80s that Rocked

“The quickest way to improve the self-esteem of everyone in America would be to hire professional photographers to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.”
― Mark Hart, Blessed Are the Bored in Spirit: A Young Catholic's Search for Meaning

“I've learned that patience is something you don't "have"; you must create it yourself. It isn't a commodity doled out to all infants in varying amounts at birth. You learn (and earn) patience by making time for it, calming yourself down, relaxing, and letting it happen. The more you practice patience, the more you have. And the more you have, the easier it is to summon when you need it most.”
― Lisa Boyer, Stash Envy: And Other Quilting Confessions And Adventures

“Sport and sportsmanship, like collecting, are words capable of diverse interpretation. Smiting a diminutive white ball and riding after it in a small vehicle to see where it went (golf is such good exercise) is sport of a sort; so is sitting in a stick hut on a marsh making oral sexual advances to passing ducks.”
― Ivor Noël Hume, All the Best Rubbish: The Classic Ode to Collecting

“Black flies, no-see-ums, deer flies, gnats and mosquitoes were instituted by the devil to force people to live in cities where he could get at them better. If it weren't for them everybody would live in the bush and he would be out of work. It was a rather successful invention.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Camping Out

“The odor of citronella is not offensive to people. It smells like gun oil. But the bugs do hate it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Camping Out

“it is remarkable that the wild apple, which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house, has frequently a harsh and crabbed taste. The Saunter-er's Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Wild Apples

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

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

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecherr

“... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.”
― Holbrook Jackson

“Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.”
― Anne Herbert

“There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight”
― Ezra Pound

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. ”
― Doris Lessing

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
― John Rogers

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”
― Mark Twain, Notebook

“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”
― Brent weeks

“Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it’s the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story.”
― Rosemary Clement-Moore

“A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“Housewives more than any other race deserve well-furnished minds. They have to live in them such a lot of the time.”
― Phyllis McGinley, Sixpence in Her Shoe

“Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best.”
― Robertson Davies

“So -- I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me -- if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time.”
― Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading Writing & the World of Books

“Of all needs a book has,
the chief need is to be readable.”
― Anthony Trollope

“I don't know if you have ever tried to read Moby-Dick on a DS in a Tesco car park - I doubt you have - but I cannot recommend it. The two miniature screens, so in harmony with the escapades of Super Mario and Lego Batman, do not lend themselves to the study of this arcane, eldritch text; and nor does the constant clamor of a small boy in the back seat asking when he can have his DS back.”
― Andy Miller

“The trouble with magical realism for me, as I suggested earlier, is that it is neither realistic nor magical.”
― Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously

“We live in an era where opinion is currency. The pressure is on us to say 'I like this' or 'I don't like that', to make snap decisions and stick them on our credit cards. But when faced with something we cannot comprehend at once, which was never intended to be snapped up or whizzed through, perhaps 'I don't like it' is an inadequate response. Don't like Middlemarch? It doesn't matter. It was here before we arrived, and will be here long after we have gone. Instead, perhaps we should have the humility to say: I didn't get it. I need to try harder.”
― Andy Miller