Bart Hopkins > Bart's Quotes

“He rarely laughed, merely smiled; she laughed enough for the two of them—and it was like hearing a sunrise.”
― Bart Hopkins, The Bends

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“You’re not a hypocrite. You aim toward lofty heights. The fact that your arrow cannot always reach them does not make you a hypocrite.”
― Harlan Coben, Darkest Fear

“Sometimes a beautiful woman had to do nothing more than smile to make you forget about any ugliness.”
― Bart Hopkins, Fluke

“It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird’s flight. But I’ll take it. With open arms.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“But that was how it went sometimes, the English language, when you really needed it, crumbled to clay in your mouth.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“Families start out, most of the time, with unconditional acceptance of one another. That acceptance starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. Somewhere in there, between childhood and adulthood, the ability to distinguish right versus wrong is born.”
― Bart Hopkins, Texas Jack

“...he thought she was going to say those three words, and his stomach did two back flips and a somersault while balancing on a high wire.”
― Bart Hopkins, The Bends

“A lot of our perception of history is influenced by inaccurate movies.”
― Nelson DeMille, Plum Island

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The only thing worse than losing hope is to be the reason someone else loses hope.”
― Tucker Elliot, The Rainy Season

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“It was nice to be around a girly girl, even if it meant there was no space for his shaving gear in the bathroom.”
― Bart Hopkins, The Bends

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“Isn't it funny how it all hangs on the edge of the random.”
― Bart Hopkins Jr., Game Time

“It’s not that I had more important things to do or that I didn’t want to help with whatever problems were interfering with her students being successful—rather, it’s this horrible truth that life has taught me: misplaced hope is the most devastatingly painful thing you can give someone.”
― Tucker Elliot, The Rainy Season

“My dad once told me that his biggest challenge after returning from Vietnam had been coming to terms with his own callousness. He’d made a deal with the war and traded his humanity for a ticket home.”
― Tucker Elliot, The Rainy Season

“One of the most glorious, yet tragic, things about being human was that, sometimes, you just had to learn things for yourself. Call it a flaw, call it a blessing, call it life. If everyone learned from everyone else’s mistakes, the world would be perfect.”
― Bart Hopkins, Like

“The reality for teachers is we don’t know if we’ve been successful or not. It takes years to see how a kid turns out, and it’s impossible to know what role we’ve played, for better or worse. It’s why so many teachers burn out—our successes are limited and rarely celebrated, but our failures are always out there for everyone to see and judge.”
― Tucker Elliot, The Rainy Season

“Alarm clocks, I felt, were nothing more than a plague rained down by an evil force, possibly even Lucifer himself.”
― Bart Hopkins, Fluke

“Love wasn’t something that could be defined or articulated, it was just something to be felt, it was something that was yours, and it didn’t matter if anyone else knew or not.”
― Bart Hopkins David Elliott

“In a way, for women, marriage was like an extended babysitting gig. The woman was committing herself to coddling and watching over a grown man for the rest of her life.”
― Bart Hopkins, Texas Jack

“I felt so much pride, so much love. You get a handful of days like this in a lifetime. Take in every minute. They’ll be over soon enough, and you never know what tomorrow will bring.”
― Tucker Elliot, The Day Before 9/11

“Cope? Adapt? Uh, no. These are military kids. They roll with it. I once asked a new student, 'See any familiar faces?' She pointed out various kids and replied, 'Seattle, Tampa, Okinawa, New Jersey.' For military dependents school is literally a non-stop revolving door of old and new friends.”
― Tucker Elliot, The Rainy Season

“The world doesn’t give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. We never quite get that, do we? Our lives have been shattered—shouldn’t the rest of us take notice? But no.”
― Harlan Coben, The Stranger

“Sami and I had exactly one day together in the old world. On Tuesday the jihadists came to our front door and knocked down our buildings. Our new world was hijacked planes, anthrax, and Afghanistan. Then we had snipers inside the Beltway. Then came Iraq. With every military action we were told reprisals were not just probable, but a foregone conclusion. An intelligence officer with a fancy PowerPoint briefed teachers on ‘our new reality.’ He called us ‘targets.’ He said ‘get used to it.’ He told our Webmaster ‘get off your ass’ and remove bus routes/stops from the school’s website. Johnny Jihad would find that information especially helpful if he decided to plow through our kids one morning as they stood half-asleep waiting for the school bus.”
― Tucker Elliot, The Rainy Season

“anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. And if your shooting stance is good, you’re probably not moving fast enough.”
― Nelson DeMille, Radiant Angel

“With one Like I can say hi to a friend, support them during a crisis, share in a joke, make someone happy, or reinforce a person’s self esteem.  I make myself part of their world.  It’s like I stopped by for coffee.  But, by Liking, I can also avoid talking to all the people I don’t want to waste time on.  Or I can check to see what my ex-girlfriend is doing seven or eight times an hour.  It’s a double-edged mouse click.”
― Bart Hopkins, Like

“I didn’t want or need their sympathy because it made me feel weak. I hated pity. I hated people feeling sorry for me.”
― Dahlia Mikha, Suck it up Princess: A memoir of strength and determination

“Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.”
― Hippocrates