Deb's quotes

(showing 1-40 of 40)

"Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told."
— Carolyn Heilbrun

tags: inspirational, storytelling
2 people liked it

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."
— Rudyard Kipling

tags: words
549 people liked it

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

tags: activism, apathy, hate, indifference, love, opposite, philosophy
7,307 people liked it

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

tags: animals, books, dogs, friends, humor
6,791 people liked it

"If you have come to these pages for laughter, may you find it.
If you are here to be offended, may your ire rise and your blood boil.
If you seek an adventure, may this song sing you away to blissful escape.
If you need to test or confirm your beliefs, may you reach comfortable conclusions.
All books reveal perfection, by what they are or what they are not.
May you find that which you seek, in these pages or outside them.
May you find perfection, and know it by name."
— Christopher Moore (Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal)

tags: lamb
92 people liked it

"Cats don't need to be possessed; they're evil are their own."
— Peter Kreeft

tags: humor, philosophy
13 people liked it

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: books, reading
2,352 people liked it

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: education, fashion
1,370 people liked it

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: honesty, inspirational
5,836 people liked it

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: life
4,429 people liked it

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

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

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: intelligence, quotation, wit
603 people liked it

"Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

tags: death, life
350 people liked it

"Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

39 people liked it

"I know I walk in and out of several worlds each day."
— Joy Harjo

4 people liked it

"We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking)

tags: explanations
31 people liked it

"I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death."
— Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony)

tags: storytelling
15 people liked it

"Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not."
— Michael Shermer

tags: patterns, perceptions, story, telling
6 people liked it

"Isabel Allende, who envisions the future world like this:

"I see a more feminine world, a world where feminine values will be validated, the same as masculine values are. A more integrated world. I see that in the future, things that we have lost in the past will be recovered. There's a search for those things, a search for spirituality, for nature, for the goddess religions, for family and human bonding. All that has been lost in this industrial era. People are in desperate need of those things. I don't think the world will destroy itself in a nuclear cataclysm. On the contrary, we have the capacity to save ourselves and save the planet, and we will use it."

And who says, "Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken."

And, she says, "You are the storyteller of your own life and you can create your own legend or not."

And, "Write what should not be forgotten.""
— Isabel Allende

6 people liked it

"Exchange the words 'have to' with 'get to.' Exchange the word 'can't' with 'unwilling.'"
— Jamie Lee Curtis

tags: inspirational
3 people liked it

"Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood."
— Jane Yolen

41 people liked it

"'Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.'"
— Jane Yolen (The Books of Great Alta: Comprising 'Sister Light, Sister Dark' and 'White Jenna')

tags: adult, fantasy, fiction, young
27 people liked it

"Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you."
— Daniel Quinn (My Ishmael)

tags: curiosity, puzzles
15 people liked it

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
— James D. Nichols

tags: english, language, words
7 people liked it

"Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: inspirational, spiritual
3 people liked it

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
— Robert A. Heinlein

tags: cats, humor, women
3,915 people liked it

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
— Noam Chomsky

tags: belief, believe, despise, expression, freedom, freedom-of-expression
95 people liked it

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

tags: advertising, apple, change, commercial, computers, different, madness, misfits, nonconformity, progressive, quo, rebels, status, think, troublemakers
7,191 people liked it

"Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger."
— Ben Okri

tags: stories
4 people liked it

"The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering."
— Ben Okri

tags: human, life
6 people liked it

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

tags: confidence
1,296 people liked it

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
— George Orwell (1984)

tags: language, thought
26 people liked it

"In the end, everything is a gag."
— Charlie Chaplin

tags: humor, inspirational
13 people liked it

"Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot."
— Charlie Chaplin

18 people liked it

"My home is where my books are."
— Ellen Thompson

10 people liked it

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost

tags: reading, writing
572 people liked it

"Wherever you go..., you'll see Heaven and Hell on every side... in us. Look for them and you'll soon know them. There on your left, Hell shuffles by, carrying a reluctant, gloomy chicken, his only comrade. There on your right, Heaven spring past, singing - a lunatic, a little too much for civilized contact.

Just the way it always was."
— Daniel Quinn (Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife: On the Other Side Known Commonly As "The Little Book")

tags: heaven, hell, purgatory
1 person 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
1,139 people liked it

"You damn your own soul better than I ever could."
— Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony)

3 people liked it

"It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out."
— Khaled Hosseini

tags: inspiration, writing
3 people liked it

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