Janet Morrison > Janet's Quotes

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
― Mark Twain

“Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary”
― Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir

“Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

“the forlorn appearance assumed by all houses that have lost their people.”
― Pat Conroy, The Water is Wide

“...she was writing a letter in her beautiful penmanship, her sentences all like well-made bracelets.”
― Pat Conroy

“She had never lived alone before, and at first found it strange, but gradually had learned to accept it as a blessing and to indulge herself in all sorts of reprehensible ways, like getting up when she felt like it, scratching herself if she itched, sitting up until two in the morning to listen to a concert.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, The Shell Seekers

“What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find happiness so easily."
(Quoted from Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim)”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, The Shell Seekers

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
― James A. Michener

“An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.”
― James A. Michener

“If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.”
― James Michener

“Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.”
― James A. Michener

“I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting.”
― James A. Michener, Tales of the South Pacific

“Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.”
― Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls

“A drop of ink may make a million think.”
― George Gordon Byron

“Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the past chose to leave behind-- for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it's a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper...No, the fault lies with the artists...The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It's them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king...Liars?...or sorcerers? Do they see the bones in the dust of the earth, see the essence of a thing that was, and clothe it in new flesh, so the plodding beast reemerges as a fabulous monster?”
― Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber

“My father always said that was the difference between an American and an Englishman. An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; an American thinks a hundred years is a long time.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Drums of Autumn

“There was a smell about the place, which I imagined as the smell of misery and fear, though I supposed it was no more than the niff of ancient squalor and an absence of drains.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

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

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

“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

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

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
― Stephen King

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”
― Ernest Hemingway