Shel > Shel's Quotes

“Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“As the cheering continued, Rhyme leaned forward and touched Milo gently on the shoulder.
"They're cheering for you," she said with a smile.
"But I could never have done it," he objected, "without everyone else's help."
"That may be true," said Reason gravely, "but you had the courage to try; and what you can do is often simply a matter of what you *will* do."
"That's why," said Azaz, "there was one very important thing about your quest that we couldn't discuss until you returned.
"I remember," said Milo eagerly. "Tell me now."
"It was impossible," said the king, looking at the Mathemagician.
"Completely impossible," said the Mathemagician, looking at the king.
"Do you mean----" said the bug, who suddenly felt a bit faint.
"Yes, indeed," they repeated together; "but if we'd told you then, you might not have gone---and, as you've discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible."
And for the remainder of the ride Milo didn't utter a sound.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“She makes a silent vow to be a vegetarian from now on even if she has to starve to do it. Better that than even the remote possibility of eating one's friends and fellow sufferers.”
― Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog

“May we all soon go about as our real selves and take joy in it, saying, yes, yes, to whatever we are.”
― Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog

“The world looks so beautiful! She wonders how one can not do for it anything that needs to be done, or at least all one can do.”
― Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog

“She tips back her head and howls: Moooooown! Oh wonderful moooooowwwwwyyyn!”
― Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog

“Ah, but is it not the mind that is the real grace of Homo sapiens? All the things to think about! All the things to read and appreciate! All the arts! All the things of the spirit!”
― Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog

“Maybe it's animalness that will make the world right again: the wisdom of elephants, the enthusiasm of canines, the grace of snakes, the mildness of anteaters. Perhaps being human needs some diluting. At any rate, how nice to be well dressed and among friends and in a state where poems pop out by themselves.”
― Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog

“When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“A night that began with mind-reading a grateful crustacean and ended with drunken elves would be a night to remember.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club

“It's American to be from somewhere else, and it's American to go from East to West. It's American to seek your fortune someplace other than where you are, or to be escaping something...”
― Carol Emshwiller, Ledoyt

“We strive for a world where every earthling has the right to live and grow. That's why we don't eat animals.”
― Ruby Roth, That's Why We Don't Eat Animals: A Book About Vegans, Vegetarians, and All Living Things

“Aa is for animals, friends, not food. We don't eat our friends. They would find it quite rude!”
― Ruby Roth, V Is for Vegan: The ABCs of Being Kind

“Many people know that animals around the world are treated badly, yet they turn their minds away. To be vegan means to care deeply about how our choices help or harm animals, how we create peace or suffering in the world. Our choices are powerful. Vegan is love.”
― Ruby Roth, Vegan Is Love: Having Heart and Taking Action

“At lunch you order steamed vegetables because you're remembering that you have a heart too. You feel humbled by your heart, it works so hard. You want to thank it. You give your heart a little pat”
― Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book."

(Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, Harper's Magazine, February 2008)”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Wild Girls

“But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty...But knowing your limits and going to them isn't arrogance. It's greatness of spirit.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Wild Girls

“Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up.”
― George Saunders

“So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“Breathe properly. Stay curious. And eat your beets.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“Literature is my Utopia”
― Helen Keller

“Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.”
― Eduardo Galeano

“It's the dying that makes the living matter.”
― Kelly Sue DeConnick, Pretty Deadly, Vol. 1: The Shrike

“The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates