Abir > Abir's Quotes

“Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
― C.S. Lewis

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
― Roald Dahl, The Twits

“Sometimes our fate is different from the one we imagined for ourselves.”
― Jean Kwok, Girl in Translation

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it”
― Roald Dahl

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

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

“You don't really understand an antagonist until you understand why he's a protagonist in his own version of the world.”
― John Rogers

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Do you fall in love often?"

Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

“Most people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they’re 75.”
― Benjamin Franklin (attributed, not found in any major work, fake)

“If you love a flower, don’t pick it up.
Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love.
So if you love a flower, let it be.
Love is not about possession.
Love is about appreciation.”
― Osho

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
― Margaret Mead

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

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

“You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.”
― Orson Scott Card

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
”
― Eugene Delacroix

“If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”
― Edward Hopper

“You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
― Mary Oliver

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde