L. > L.'s Quotes

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.”
― Ellen DeGeneres, The Funny Thing Is...

“Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.”
― Lord Chesterfield

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status, or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we all believe that we are above-average drivers.”
― Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 50

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty...But I am too busy thinking about myself.”
― Edith Sitwell

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.”
― Adlai E. Stevenson

“Advice is seldom welcome and those who need it the most like it the least.”
― Lord Chesterfield

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald, The Collected Writings

“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

“Honest error is to be pitied not ridiculed.”
― Lord Chesterfield

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
― Aristotle

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”
― George Burns

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
― Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
― Maya Angelou