Vicky C > Vicky's Quotes

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
― William Arthur Ward

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“The best revenge is living well without you. ”
― Joyce Carol Oates, ed.

“Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave -
The water below is as dark as the grave,
And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat -
It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.”
― R.L. Stine

“She thought it over, but couldn’t see any immediate loopholes other than the threat of her inner slut emerging, and she could darned well control that little bitch.”
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Natural Born Charmer

“Make-up? What happened? You look almost female."
"Thanks. You look almost straight.”
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Natural Born Charmer

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.”
― Emma Donoghue, Room

“No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”
― Hal Borland

“Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“When I desire you a part of me is gone...”
― Anne Carson

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there. ”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“Laugh loudly, laugh often, and most important, laugh at yourself.”
― Chelsea Handler, Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me

“People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Hearts are not to be had as a gift, hearts are to be earned.”
― W.B. Yeats

“I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“..the world seems full of good men--even if there are monsters in it.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men´s eyes, because they know -or think they know- some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Though sympathy alone can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Doctor, you don't know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don't; you couldn't with eyebrows like yours.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“...they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle.

And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“Empedolces claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebrae; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart…I do nothing all day, boredom settles in, I look at the sky so I get to feel even smaller than I already feel and my mind keeps poisoning itself uselessly.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad