Shannon > Shannon's Quotes

“We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

“I am a part of all that I have met.”
― Alfred Tennyson, The Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson

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

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
― Harry S. Truman

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.”
― Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch

“I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“Have no fear of moving into the unknown. Simply step out fearlessly knowing that I am with you, therefore no harm can befall you; all is very, very well. Do this in complete faith and confidence.”
― Pope John Paul II

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
― George Eliot

“Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.”
― George Eliot

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

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”
― Joss Whedon

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“To understand all is to forgive all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“No one is ever holy without suffering.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised!
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon:
Be it lawful I take up what's cast away.
Gods, gods! 'tis strange that from their cold'st neglect
My love should kindle to inflamed respect.
Thy dowerless daughter, king, thrown to my chance,
Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France:
Not all the dukes of waterish Burgundy
Can buy this unprized precious maid of me.
Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind:
Thou losest here, a better where to find.”
― William Shakespeare , King Lear

“Oh, it makes SUCH a difference. It LOOKS so much nicer. When you hear a name pronounced can't you always see it in your mind, just as if it was printed out? I can; and A-n-n looks dreadful, but A-n-n-e looks so much more distinguished. If you'll only call me Anne spelled with an E I shall try to reconcile myself to not being called Cordelia.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Cordelia: I hope I've got a vocation.

Charles: I don't know what that means.

Cordelia: It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”
― Pope John Paul II

“A person's rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.”
― Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“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