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#1

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

tags: books, life, limits

20233 likes

#2

“I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.”
― Dorothy Parker, Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker

360 likes

#3

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

752 likes

#4

“Lewis thought all children came into the world knowing some truth about magic and God. He thought the journey of adulthood was to forget about these things and then partake in the path to remembering. Lewis said one of the purposes of art was to point people toward what they already knew. Now Wren really needed to know: Where is the art here, Lewis? And what path?”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

tags: art, knowing, truth

6 likes

#5

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

tags: art, artists, evil, happiness, pain

1587 likes

#6

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

tags: love

6641 likes

#7

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

tags: equality, humanity, imagination, loneliness, poetry, solipsism, world

748 likes

#8

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

tags: life

2116 likes

#9

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

1591 likes

#10

“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

tags: frankenstein, gothic, horror, mary-shelley

1294 likes

#11

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

6026 likes

#12

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

tags: art, arts-and-humanities, creative-process, writing

4458 likes

#13

“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

tags: creativity, invention, quip, wings, writing

4373 likes

#14

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

tags: fact

3992 likes

#15

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

3559 likes

#16

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

tags: hindsight, regret

3226 likes

#17

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

3166 likes

#18

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

tags: not-alone

1431 likes

#19

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

tags: action, community, daring, loneliness, purpose, youth

1035 likes

#20

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

tags: escape, escapism, first-sentence, opening-lines, reality, sanity

1306 likes

#21

“Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup
of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone
else you will never see your cup of stars again”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

71 likes

#22

“It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted.
And I am comforted.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

tags: comfort

170 likes

#23

“I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

147 likes

#24

“It is my belief that the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical) wishes an Inhabitant for Itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies.

If I leave, then the House will have no Inhabitant and how will I bear the thought of it Empty?”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

tags: inspirational-attitude

61 likes

#25

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

tags: books, reading

2331 likes

#26

“We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Volume 1

1879 likes

#27

“There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

tags: coming-of-age, human-nature, individuality

482 likes

#28

“Change is freedom, change is life.

It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.

There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.”
― Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

290 likes

#29

“Go to bed; tired is stupid.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

215 likes

#30

“We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters

tags: dreams, forest, mind

201 likes

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