Ruth E > Ruth's Quotes

“If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.”
― Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.”
― M.L Stedman

“Scars are just another kind of memory.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory....Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.”
― Stephanie Klein, Straight Up and Dirty

“Each of us is a book waiting to be written, and that book, if written, results in a person explained.”
― Thomas M. Cirignano, The Constant Outsider: Memoirs of a South Boston Mechanic

“The greatest challenge of my life has been to see and accept the actual truth without great pain and struggle against it.”
― M.C. Halliday, I Came Up Stairs: A Victorian Courtesan's Memoirs, 1867 to 1871

“Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga. ”
― William Zinsser

“For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them.”
― Kirby Wright, Moloka'i Nui Ahina: Summers on the Lonely Isle

“I think this is what we all want to hear: that we are not alone in hitting the bottom, and that it is possible to come out of that place courageous, beautiful, and strong.”
― Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith

“Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.”
― John Berger

“The features of character are carved out of adversity.”
― Rick Barnett

“Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding.”
― Meghan Lamb

“Aren’t autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don’t we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.”
― Frederick Weisel

“Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores.
— Teller: A Novel”
― Frederick Weisel

“For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon.”
― Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History

“Make me a captive, Lord,
And then I shall be free;
Force me to render up my sword,
And I shall conqueror be.
I sink in life's alarms
When by myself I stand;
Imprison me within Thine arms,
And strong shall be my hand”
― George Matheson

“I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Someone else always has to carry on the story.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass