Steve Griffin > Steve's Quotes

“Nothing is more lethal to the effect that a ghost story should make than for the author to provide alternative materialist solution. This reduces a poem to a puzzle and confines the reader’s spirit instead of enlarging it.”
― Robert Aickman

“I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“Whenever I've made a choice in my life, a real choice... I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach.”
― Kawai Strong Washburn, Sharks in the Time of Saviors

“That which is torn develops an increased capacity for insight and forbearance. A capacity to experience sensations that escape the notice of others.”
― Geetanjali Shree, Tomb of Sand

“Blake would say that there are some places in the Universe where the Fall has not occurred, the world has not turned upside down and Eden still exists. Here Mankind is not governed by the rules of reason, stupid and strict, but by the heart and intuition. The people do not indulge in idle chatter, parading what they know, but create remarkable things by applying their imagination. The state ceases to impose the shackles of daily oppression, but helps people to realize their hopes and dreams. And Man is not just a cog in the system, not just playing a role, but a free Creature.”
― Olga Tokarczuk

“In a way, people like her, who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind - that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that's constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality - its inexpressibility.”
― Olga Tokarczuk

“If the one thing you are, the part you always figured would be your best, if that gets taken away, the next day...' I shrug. 'The next day it's like you're carrying your whole future like a dead body on your back.”
― Kawai Strong Washburn

“I didn't think about anything, and yet I thought about everything. It was a special kind of thinking, the sort I'd always done when I was getting close to writing a book”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“If this is a dream, the details are good. It's the absolute truth. They are a novelist's details... but in dreams, perhaps everyone is a novelist. How is one to know?”
― Stephen King

“I just liked the idea that there's still things that we don't know. At school, it's the same thing, every day. I liked that it might be all right to believe in large, mad, wild things.”
― Katherine Rundell, The Explorer

“In our society most of us wear protective masks (psychological ones) of various kinds, and for various reasons. Very often, the end result is that the mask grows to us, displacing our original characters with our assumed characters.”
― Clarence John Laughlin

“Once you realize that power will always end up with the sort of people who crave it, I think that there are worse people who could have it than Peter.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“My looking ripens things
and they come towards me, to meet and be met.”
― Rilke

“It is almost as though
something else is breathing

quite close by, invisibly.
The mystery of the names…
Albizzia. Gleditsia.

Aucuba japonica. And
I am listening, seeing. Seeing,
like someone twice alive.”
― John Allison

“We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don't know a thing about.”
― Robert Sapolsky

“Poetry for me is a result of lyrical meditation, pre-verbal in origin, and much of the craft has to do with finding a contemporary diction that embodies, at times subverts but never betrays that pre-verbal lyrical source: the presence of song before it is sung.”
― John Allison

“In dividing the light, things are seen. And we notice ourselves.”
― John Allison

“Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.”
― Paul Auster

“At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better”
― Barack Obama

“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”
― Anne Frank

“Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.”
― John Fowles

“I think now, looking back, that we all die, little by little, as each of those we love departs before us.”
― Brian Ruckley, Fall of Thanes

“Think how much happier the world might be if people sought approval for what they do from their children instead of their ancestors.”
― Brian Ruckley, Winterbirth

“I read; I travel; I become”
― Derek Walcott

“One day we shall die. But all the other days we shall be alive.”
― Per Olov Enquist

“Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
― Elmore Leonard

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”
― Neil Gaiman