Paula D > Paula's Quotes

“I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, 'I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say'; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.”
― Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.

What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don’t force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

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

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You endure what is unbearable, and you bear it. That is all.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“These are the days that must happen to you.”
― Walt Whitman

“To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.”
― Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman's Camden Conversations

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”
― Walt Whitman

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
― Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!"

Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland: and Through The Looking Glass

“In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream- Lingering in the golden gleam- Life, what is it but a dream?”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
― Stephen King

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”
― Sir Francis Bacon

“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
― George R. R. Martin

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
― Mark Twain

“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

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“I'm not in search of sanctity, sacredness, purity; these things are found after this life, not in this life; but in this life I search to be completely human: to feel, to give, to take, to laugh, to get lost, to be found, to dance, to love and to lust, to be so human.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“One must always be careful of books,' said Tessa, 'and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.'

'I'm not sure a book has ever changed me,' said Will. 'Well there is one volume that promises to teach one how to turn oneself into an entire flock of sheep-'

'Only the very weak minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry,' said Tessa, determined not to let him run wildly off with the conversation.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“It gives me strength to have somebody to fight for; I can never fight for myself, but, for others, I can kill.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter