Madeleine > Madeleine's Quotes

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Novel writing seems an altogether less intimidating occupation when one considers that one only need produce a small tale.”
― Charlie Lovett, First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen

“A good book is like a good friend. It will stay with you for the rest of your life. When you first get to know it, it will give you excitement and adventure, and years later it will provide you with comfort and familiarity. And best of all, you can share it with your children or your grandchildren or anyone you love enough to let into its secrets.”
― Charlie Lovett, First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen

“You see, I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others-- why they must dream up new and marvelous spheres, or long to live elsewhere, beyond this dominion... but that is not my business. We are all different, I suppose. All I ever wanted was to know this world. I can say now, as I reach my end, that I know quite a bit more of it than I knew when I arrived. Moreover, my little bit of knowledge has been added to all the other accumulated knowledge of history-- added to the great library, as it were. That is no small feat, sir. Anyone who can say such a thing has lived a fortunate life.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“Astonishingly, at some point, a sputtering torch was thrust into her hands. Alma did not see who gave it to her. She had never before been entrusted with fire. The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos-the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path.

Nobody stopped her.

She was a comet.

She did not know that she was not flying.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others'. To hide from anything. That was Marian's text. Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“Nevertheless, no fictions.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“Where you find the greatest good, there you will also find greatest Evil, for Evil likes Paradise every bit as much as Good does. What makes the best environment for Clematis armandi makes a lovely home for leaf hoppers. A place where Joe Allston hopes to enjoy his retirement turns out to be Tom Weld's ancestral acres and a place attractive to Caliban.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“It is hard doctrine, but I was beginning to understand it then, and I have not repudiated it till now: that love, not sin, costs us Eden. Love is a carrier of death - the only thing, in fact, that makes death significant.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
― Anne Tyler

“It reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonable well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

“No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner—continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you—is a fine art, in and of itself.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“It’s a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“I believe feminism is grounded in supporting the choices of women even if we wouldn’t make certain choices for ourselves.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“I believe women not just in the United States but throughout the world deserve equality and freedom but know I am in no position to tell women of other cultures what that equality and freedom should look like.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist