Rebecca Vance > Rebecca's Quotes

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.”
― Stephen Colbert

“We cry coming into the world, as everyone around us laughs with joy. And we laugh with joy leaving this world, when everyone around us cries.”
― Wendy Corsi Staub, Awakening

“Without trust, there can be no genuine peace. Neither in politics, nor in the quiet individuality of the heart and spirit.”
― Timothy Zahn, Star Wars: Vision of the Future

“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

“My Teacher Sees Right Through Me

I didn’t do my homework.
My teacher asked me, “Why?”
I answered him, “It’s much too hard.”
He said, “You didn’t try.”
I told him, “My dog ate it.”
He said, “You have no dog.”
I said, “I went out running.”
He said, “You never jog.”

I told him, “I had chores to do.”
He said, “You watched TV.”
I said, “I saw the doctor.”
He said, “You were with me.”

My teacher sees right through my fibs,
which makes me very sad.
It’s hard to fool the teacher
when the teacher is your dad.”
― Bruce Lansky

“A man who respects his wife, does not sleep with other women. And a woman who respects herself does not allow her husband to get away with it”
― Courtney Giardina, Tear Stained Beaches

“You see, in every story, it’s not about the ending. It’s about the chapters in between and how you make it through them”
― Courtney Giardina, Tear Stained Beaches

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.”
― Michael Crichton

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

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

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

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov

“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

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”
― Meg Cabot