- If hers was the precise angle of cut crystal flashing in the light, his was the warm glow of a candle through bone china. If hers was long-stemmed red roses, his was garden roses, on a trellis, still growing.
- Barbara Snow Gilbert, Broken Chords
- I look back. Mama is standing on the front porch watching us. Beautiful, she mouths. I feel like I could cry. For the first time ever, I feel it. Beautiful, I mean.
- "When I was little," Christy said softly, "I used to think that the sky at night was a big black blanket that separated heaven from earth, and the stars were a bunch of little pinholes that the angels poked in the blanket so that they could look down on us."
- Robin Jones Gunn, Yours Forever
- Judy's a dying breed. She's a romantic.
- 'Jean', Judi Dench, As Time Goes By
- Le verbe aimer est un des plus difficile à conjuguer: son passé n’est pas simple, son présent n’est qu’indicatif et son futur est toujours conditionnel.
- I'm in love with God, and God's in love with me. This is who I am, and this is who I'll be. And that settles it--completely.
- Il faut bien que je supporte deux ou trois chenilles si je veux connaître les papillons.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince
- There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
- The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
- I do not care what car you drive. Where you live. If you know someone who knows someone who knows someone. If your clothes are this years cutting edge. If your trust fund is unlimited. If you are A-list B-list or never heard of you list. I only care about the words that flutter from your mind. They are the only thing you truly own. The only thing I will remember you by. I will not fall in love with your bones and skin. I will not fall in love with the places you have been. I will not fall in love with anything but the words that flutter from your extraordinary mind.
- Andre Jordan, Extraordinary Mind
- I am an artist (because saying you are one makes it true).
- A stranger. She had never met one. Not a real stranger with odd clothes and an accent.
- Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children dragons can be killed.
- You shouldn’t have to settle--your writing should give you the chills.
- A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
- It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
- There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief ... and unspeakable love.
- I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
- Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
- 'Eleanora', Edgar Allen Poe
- If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.
- Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
- Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
- Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
- 'Prepare for your sister-in-law, Eleanor, and such a sister-in-law as you must delight in!--Open, candid, artless, guileless, with affections strong but simple, forming no pretensions, and knowing no disguise.' 'Such a sister-in-law, Henry, I should delight in,' said Eleanor, with a smile.
- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
- 'I do not understand you.' 'Then we are on very unequal terms, for I understand you perfectly well.' 'Me?--yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.'
- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
- The most difficult battle you ever fight is the battle to be unique in a world that will marshal its every force to keep you the same.
- She moved closer to Robert and they marched along together, arms about each other's waists, their pace matching perfectly, step for step.
- Theresa Tomlinson, The Forestwife Trilogy
- Harry Potter. Making boys lose interest in girls since 1997.
- (blog entry: 'Trials of the free coke', Kristina Horner)
- link
- You don't choose the theatre; The theatre choses you.
- 'Martha Rodgers', Susan Sullivan, Castle
- Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyze yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.
- You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
- I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.
- 'You would not understand that to which I so grammatically refer,' I said, and poured the drink for her.
- Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
- The entire 'The Friend of Your Youth' passage
- Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
- Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
- I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizably wiser than oneself.
- I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
- To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself ... Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
- Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart ...
- Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe.
- Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
- I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do. And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
- The important thing is this: To be able to, at any moment, to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
- Tired people aren't witty.
- 'Susan Mayer', Teri Hatcher, Desperate Housewives
- Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.
- Albus Dumbledore, J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
- Hello, it's me. I couldn't sleep. I was just counting sheep. I'm missing you. (song: 'To Bring You Back', Paul Alan)
- a Sesame Street episode
- Bert: I don't want to. I'll look silly.
- Ernie: Silly's fun, Bert!
- Bert: I'm not really good at that kind of thing.
- Ernie: Just try it.
- Bert: I'M JUST NOT EMOTIONALLY SECURE ENOUGH FOR THIS, ERNIE!
- Don't study creative writing at university (or not as an undergraduate). Study something else, like history or geography or literature, learn as much as you can. Plus read poetry.
- All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
- For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
- The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
- You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.
- Miss Mayblunt begged to be allowed to keep her cocktail untouched before her, just to look at. The color was marvelous! She could compare it to nothing she had ever seen, and the garnet lights which it emitted were unspeakably rare.
- Kate Chopin, The Awakening
- Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
- Oh, Gravity, thou art a heartless bitch.
- 'Sheldon,' The Big Bang Theory
- Apostrophes are not like sugar, which you can sprinkle randomly all over something to make it nicer.
- He [E. E. Cummings] had little use for the mass of people but was delighted by the promise inherent in individuals.
- Adventures in American Literature
- Je préfère éviter les contacts.
- 'Profession Libérale', Marie Le Drian
- What's your major and why did you choose it?
- If you'd ask me this question about a month ago, I would have told you that I was majoring in English Literature so that I could become an editor of novels, so that I could become the next Julie Strauss-Gabel to the next John Green.
- Answering Questions, JustMargaret
- We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already; we have the power to imagine better. (J. K. Rowling)
- People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.
- 'The Ring of Time', E.B. White
- True genius without heart is a thing of nought - for not great understanding alone, not intelligence alone, nor both together, make genius. Love! Love! Love! that is the soul of genius.
- Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin
- He needed to see the formula not as math, which he hated, but as language, which he loved.
- An Abundance of Katherines, John Green
sep 23 2012 ∞
oct 4 2016 +