Dilan Abdah > Dilan's Quotes

“If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.”
― Mark Twain, Notebook

“If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.”
― Tallulah Bankhead

“V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.”
― Jess C Scott, EyeLeash: A Blog Novel

“I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?”
― Jess C. Scott, Wicked Lovely

“Everything you do is triggered by an emotion of either desire or fear.”
― Brian Tracy

“With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“When I turn thirty, in thirty days or so, I might be feeling old, so I’ll probably call my grandma up, because as old as I’ll feel, she’ll be feeling older. Twelve years older.
”
― Jarod Kintz, This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks

“Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in.”
― Lynsay Sands, A Quick Bite

“deep down I believe my year was a special year: it produced me.”
― Ned Vizzini

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”
― Gary Provost

“History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others. Human”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”
― Robert Heinlein

“I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl in Blue

“Forever is composed of nows.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The covers of this book are too far apart.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I never felt that I was good enough, strong enough, smart enough. He let me know that there was always room for improvement. A lot of sons would have been crippled by his demands, but instead the discipline rubbed off on me. I turned it into drive.”
― Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

“Being busy helping customers meant that I had no time to train the way I was used to, with an intense four-or five-hour workout each day. So I adopted the idea of training twice a day, two hours before work and two hours from seven to nine in the evening, when business slacked off and only the serious lifters were left. Split workouts seemed like an annoyance at first, but I realized I was onto something when I saw the results: I was concentrating better and recovering faster while grinding out longer and harder sets. On many days I would add a third training session at lunchtime. I'd isolate a body part that I thought was weak and give it thirty or forty minutes of my full attention, blasting twenty sets of calf raises, say, or one hundred triceps extensions. I did the same thing some nights after dinner, coming back to train for an hour at eleven o'clock. As I went to sleep in my snug little room, I'd often feel one or another muscle that I'd traumatized that day jumping and twitching-just a side effect of a successful workout and every pleasing, because I knew those fibers would now recover and grow.”
― Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

“Keep your friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“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

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“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

“There is an ancient tribal proverb I once heard in India. It says that before we can see properly we must first shed our tears to clear the way.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“My name is a song I sing myself to remind me of my mothers voice. My name does not bend to your tongue, does not stop at your borders. My name is not a flight risk. I sing my name to remind me of a time where our language was in our blood. A time when our mothers were in our hair, a time when vowels came from the same deep place as laughter, and the pit of thirst was not so wide. Oh beloved, I walk the gauntlet of life barefoot and bound, clawing at the hills for the voice I left at the house where my mother and her own were born. I gather words like stones to feed my children, they thirst for words that sound like the shape of their eyes. Where oh beloved, where will I find such words?”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars