Cybil > Cybil's Quotes

“[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”
― Judy Blume

“I see great things in baseball.”
― Walt Whitman

“Shades of a new morning standing still are worse than the shades of night. At least a person can understand the dark of night. It’s not fickle like the day.”
― Sarah E. Wright, This Child's Gonna Live

“You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“Black man cleans the streets but mustn't walk freely on the pavement; Black man must build houses for the white man but cannot live in them; Black man cooks the white man's food but eats what is left over. Don't listen to anyone bluff you and say Black and white are brothers.”
― Es’kia Mphahlele

“Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.”
― Ossie Davis

“The idea came to me complete from start to finish – a most unusual occurrence, as any writer will tell you, for ordinarily a story has to be struggled with, changed around and mixed up.”
― Philip Van Doren Stern

“A sad tale's best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins.”
― William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

“Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”
― Clement Clarke Moore, Twas the Night Before Christmas

“A smile is the universal welcome.”
― Max Eastman, The Sense of Humor

“The heads of strong old age are beautiful / Beyond all grace of youth”
― Robinson Jeffers

“Football is a great deal like life in that it teaches that work, sacrifice, perseverance, competitive drive, selflessness and respect for authority is the price that each and every one of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.”
― Vince Lombardi Jr.

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

“I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they're always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world. And fantasy comes along and says, 'We're going to break all the laws of physics.”
― Ray Bradbury

“But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination and faith are their strongest weapons. At best such men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad...”
― Walt Unsworth, Everest: A Mountaineering History

“Never give up... No one knows what's going to happen next.”
― L. Frank Baum

“A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.”
― John le Carré

“Whenever he saw his books in a store, he felt like he’d gotten away with something, said John Updike. Who also expressed the opinion that a nice person wouldn’t become a writer. The problem of self-doubt. The problem of shame. The problem of self-loathing. You once put it like this: When I get so fed up with something I’m writing that I decide to quit, and then, later, I find myself irresistibly drawn back to it, I always think: Like a dog to its vomit.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky. How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring