Amanda Stevens > Amanda's Quotes

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?"

"So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
― Maya Angelou

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
― Annie Dillard, The Living

“Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.”
― David Quammen, The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder

“The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.”
― Annie Dillard

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“It's actually very difficult to make something both simple and good.”
― Paul Simon

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“Don't write about Man; write about a man.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“[Raymond Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.”
― New Yorker

“You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.”
― C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (The Chronicles of Narnia, #4)

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“My Chief Rabbit has told me to stay and defend this run, and until he says otherwise, I shall stay here. --Bigwig”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“Welcome, Prince,' said Aslan. 'Do you feel yourself sufficient to take up the Kingship of Narnia?'

I - I don't think I do, Sir,' said Caspian. 'I am only a kid.'

Good,' said Aslan. 'If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been proof that you were not.”
― C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

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

“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“For we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.”
― Richard Bach

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