Julie's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 220)

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

tags: books, children, difficult, grown-ups, write, writers, writing
2,991 people liked it

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

tags: activism, humor, life, pleasure
1,806 people liked it

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: enemies, forgiveness, strategy
5,979 people liked it

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: inspirational, music, philosophy
5,502 people liked it

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

tags: best, life, love, mistakes, out-of-control, truth, worst
10,397 people liked it

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

tags: sympathy
1,700 people liked it

"...we accept the love we think we deserve."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

tags: inspirational, love
2,381 people liked it

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
— e.e. cummings

tags: courage
2,212 people liked it

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: body, soul
3,363 people liked it

"A person's a person, no matter how small."
— Dr. Seuss

tags: inspirational
2,244 people liked it

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you.
I'd been broken beyond repair."
— Stephenie Meyer (New Moon)

tags: heart-break, love
3,305 people liked it

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
— Mahatma Gandhi

tags: happiness
1,352 people liked it

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
— Toni Morrison

tags: books, writing
1,102 people liked it

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
— Henry David Thoreau

tags: writing
464 people liked it

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)

tags: writing
476 people liked it

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf

tags: writing
330 people liked it

"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it is then discovered."
— Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

tags: writing
49 people liked it

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."
— Anaïs Nin

tags: writing
177 people liked it

"Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego."
— Norman Mailer

tags: humor, writing
34 people liked it

"Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy."
— Anne Frank

tags: anne, beauty, frank, happy
761 people liked it

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."
— Douglas Adams

tags: learning
319 people liked it

"Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life."
— Augusten Burroughs (Dry: A Memoir)

tags: first-sentence
12 people liked it

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: love
828 people liked it

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master..."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

tags: love
1,734 people liked it

"i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)"
— e.e. cummings

tags: love, poetry
737 people liked it

"Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

tags: humor, love
181 people liked it

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated: A Novel)

tags: life, love
257 people liked it

"You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride."
— Jodi Picoult (Mercy)

tags: inequality, love, marriage
223 people liked it

"and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart."
— Jodi Picoult

tags: death, heart, love, mourning, suicide
171 people liked it

"You save yourself or you remain unsaved."
— Alice Sebold

121 people liked it

"I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

tags: life
143 people liked it

"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.-Atticus Finch"
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

tags: courage
398 people liked it

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath

tags: writing
568 people liked it

"You are what you write."
— Helvy Tiana Rosa (Risalah Cinta)

tags: writing
152 people liked it

"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

tags: fiction, life, writing
226 people liked it

"After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?"
— Frank O'Hara (The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara)

tags: drinking, matches, poetry, vodka, writing
37 people liked it

"the writing of some
men
is like a vast bridge
that carries you
over
the many things
that claw and tear.

"The Wine of Forever""
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

tags: writing
46 people liked it

"I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean."
— Toni Morrison

tags: morrison, race, toni, writing
33 people liked it

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."
— Saul Bellow

tags: imagination, inspiration, writing
267 people liked it

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
— W. Somerset Maugham

tags: writing
93 people liked it

"When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.'"
— Neil Gaiman

tags: writing
101 people liked it

"Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"
— Albert Einstein

tags: creativity, humor
1,950 people liked it

"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."
— Miss Piggy

tags: humor
5,607 people liked it

"Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away."
— Robert Maynard Hutchins

tags: exercise, humor, laziness
5,816 people liked it

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

tags: humor, scifi
3,240 people liked it

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it."
— Groucho Marx

tags: books, humor, reading
743 people liked it

"Reality continues to ruin my life."
— Bill Watterson (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)

tags: calvin-and-hobbes, humor, life
2,607 people liked it

"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: creation, god, humor, man
777 people liked it

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"
— Douglas Adams

tags: humor, wit
1,407 people liked it

"Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before."
— Steven Wright

tags: amnesia, humor, memory
736 people liked it

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