Steve Masler > Steve's Quotes

“You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

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

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”
― Steve Martin

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
― Tom Waits

“Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.”
― Ann Patchett

“Everyone knows everything eventually.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
― François Rabelais

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie. ”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“Being easily freaked out comes with its own special skill set: you develop subtle tricks to work around it, make sure people don't notice. Pretty soon, if you're a fast learner, you can get through the day looking almost exactly like a normal human being.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.”
― Richard Brautigan

“Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.”
― Rachel Carson

“It is not half so important to know as to feel.”
― Rachel Carson

“When I was a baby child, they put the jinx on me. It was in my drink and food and milk. And when I ran, it heavied in my bones and when I sang, it stopped up my throat and when I loved, it let from me, hot and poisonous. I saw it in my daddy, the hard lines of his face, that uneasy lope - how in his years he didn't lift his feet, but slid them, soles across this gritted earth. It settled in my mama, trembled her voice and blanked her eyes. My brother, Billy, locked it inside him and it carried him low into that deep earth, silting then into the river and dew and air, in the moths and bee catchers, borne skyward and, as will be, lowed again, into earth again. It's dusking. There goes the sun. There goes sky and cloud and light, taken into that black horizon. And I know I am bad crossed. I see its line. It reaches up, arcs. It cuts through me. It draws me on and dogs me down to that place where I am bound. And when it is I borne down, my eyes and mouth stitched with gut, when they take my balls and brain and heart, and that deeper black claims me wholly, then let me meet that sumbitch at his eye, for I know my name's been writ - Robert Lee Chatham - in his Book.”
― Bill Cheng, Southern Cross the Dog

“It’s not finding what’s lost, it’s understanding what you’ve found.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Museum of Extraordinary Things

“The truth frightens people because it isn’t stable. It shifts every day. If you’d prefer to remain in the dark, I would understand.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Museum of Extraordinary Things

“Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.”
― Miller Williams

“Every word you add dilutes the sentence.”
― Miller Williams