C. A. 's quotes

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"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

tags: dance, heaven, hurt, inspirational, life, love, sing
16,722 people liked it

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

tags: einstein, human, humor, infinity, nature, philosophy, science, stupidity, universe
12,600 people liked it

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Maya Angelou

tags: life
11,722 people liked it

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

tags: confidence, inspirational, wisdom
10,848 people liked it

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

tags: lies, lying, memory, truth
9,808 people liked it

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

tags: humor, insanity, life
10,005 people liked it

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

tags: action, actions, disappointed, disappointment, discover, dream, dreams, explore, sail
8,178 people liked it

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: intelligence, self-deprecation
7,977 people liked it

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

tags: activism, apathy, hate, indifference, love, opposite, philosophy
7,435 people liked it

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

tags: life
7,522 people liked it

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
— John Lennon

tags: beatles, fate, life, planning, plans
7,221 people liked it

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

tags: exercise, humor, laziness
6,077 people liked it

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

tags: individuality, majority, minority, pause, reflect, wisdom
6,494 people liked it

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
— Mark Twain

tags: humor, procrastination
5,822 people liked it

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

tags: books, classic, humor
5,747 people liked it

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

tags: deadlines, humor, work
5,528 people liked it

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

tags: inspirational, music, philosophy
5,950 people liked it

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
— Friedrich Nietzsche

tags: strength
5,582 people liked it

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

tags: inspirational, optimism, perception, pessimism
5,310 people liked it

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

tags: inspirational, stories, writing
2,830 people liked it

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

tags: anais, nin, qoutes, writing
631 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
584 people liked it

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."
— Willa Cather

tags: life, writing
146 people liked it

"My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see."
— Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim)

tags: inspirational, tattoo, writing
101 people liked it

"Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

tags: writing
62 people liked it

"Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form."
— John Berger

tags: autobiography, john, john-berger, life, self, writing
24 people liked it

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."
— Philip Pullman

tags: books, stories, writing
146 people liked it

"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

tags: inspirational, life, writing
58 people liked it

"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him."
— Vladimir Nabokov

tags: writing
43 people liked it

"If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page.
This is how we go on."
— Stephen King

tags: writing
35 people liked it

"And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is."
— Paul Auster

tags: books, writing
20 people liked it

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
"
— Elmore Leonard

tags: writing
18 people liked it

"A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
"
— Raymond Chandler

tags: writing
7 people liked it

""Only half the story is true. The rest is necessary.""
— John Yau

tags: writing
5 people liked it

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."
— Neil Gaiman

tags: writing
137 people liked it

"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."
— Stephen King (On Writing)

tags: advice, writing
44 people liked it

"Writing is a delicious agony."
— Gwendolyn Brooks

tags: writing
8 people liked it

"Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.
"
— Harvey Pekar

tags: life, writing
8 people liked it

"Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn't make it a living breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

tags: writing
8 people liked it

"To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes."
— Akira Kurosawa

tags: art, creativity, writing
6 people liked it

"Writing a book is a horrible,
exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
— George Orwell

tags: writing
84 people liked it

"When I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

tags: dreaming, writing
10 people liked it

"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
305 people liked it

"It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

tags: journey, travel
40 people liked it

"People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within. "
— Ursula K. Le Guin

19 people liked it

"This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Farthest Shore)

16 people liked it

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)

tags: reader, reading, stories, story
14 people liked it

"Truth is a matter of the imagination."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

tags: imagination, truth
12 people liked it

"I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

7 people liked it

"To see that you life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (Gifts)

tags: life, living, story
5 people liked it

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