McKelle George > McKelle's Quotes

“I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.”
― Amy Hempel

“To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies.
The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.”
― Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”
― John Cheever

“My mouth is a fire escape.
The words coming out
don’t care that they are naked.
There is something burning in there.”
― Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.”
― Joan Bauer

“When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“There is no sinner like a young saint.”
― Aphra Behn

“How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.”
― Jonathan Franzen

“Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.”
― Richard Flanagan

“When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality–your soul, if you will–is as bright and shining as any that has ever been....Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.”
― George Saunders

“No one fights dirtier or more brutally than blood; only family knows it’s own weaknesses, the exact placement of the heart. The tragedy is that one can still live with the force of hatred, feel infuriated that once you are born to another, that kinship lasts through life and death, immutable, unchanging, no matter how great the misdeed or betrayal. Blood cannot be denied, and perhaps that’s why we fight tooth and claw, because we cannot—being only human—put asunder what God has joined together.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“Comedy is the blues for people who can’t sing.”
― Chris Rock

“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them. ”
― Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

“God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself. I wanted simply you, nothing of yours.”
― Heloise, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse

“Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.”
― Jean de La Fontaine

“I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.”
― Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

“Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love...I sought what I might love, in love with loving.”
― Augustine of Hippo

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Philippe Ariès

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
― Joan Didion

“We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck. But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness. ”
― Ellen Goodman