Amos > Amos's Quotes

“He took up his usual position in the reading room in a chair next to the window and read on, utterly focused on his book. He reminded me of a butterfly drinking the last drop of nectar from a flower. A win-win for both the flower and the butterfly. The butterfly gets nutrition, the flower gets help pollinating. A mutually beneficial relationship, which harms no one. One of the wonderful things about the act of reading”
― Haruki Murakami

“She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“Every moral precept is an delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That's all history is, after all: scar tissue.”
― Steven King

“Who himself is not the cause of his own unrest? Reflect how no one is hampered by any other; and that all is as thinking makes it so.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“If I've thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“After the small woman had left, Ushikawa stared at the door for the longest time. She had shut the door behind her, but there was still a strong sense of her in the room. Maybe in exchange for leaving a trace of herself behind, she had taken away a part of Ushikawa's soul. He could feel that new void within his chest. Why did this happen? he wondered, finding it odd. And what could it possibly mean?”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?”
― Tim O'Brien

“When he got to the tank’s flat, circular cap, it seemed that he must be standing directly under the roof of the world, and if he reached up he could scratch blue chalk from the bottom of the sky with his fingernails”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“...the reality of the days washed away the possibilities of the past, and time moved on.”
― Guillermo Del Toro, Chuck Hogan

“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Effort within the mind further limits the mind, because effort implies struggle toward a goal and when you have a goal, a purpose, an end in view, you have placed a limit on the mind.”
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do: New Expanded Edition

“In that brief time between, the night had been a fragrant puzzle, a time when, looking up at the star-strewn sky and listening to the breeze that brought such intoxicating smells, you felt close to the heartbeat of the universe, to love and life.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“I'm not in this business primarily to describe or explain or entertain. I'm here to make the reader think, even if I have to bash his teeth out, break his legs, grind him up, beat him down, and totally chastise him for the terrible and tinsel and almost wholly bad world we allow.”
― David R. Bunch

“But I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.”
― Gloria Naylor

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“there are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see...or to at least shut up about what you do see that's different. they are agents of the status quo. not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Is the present state of the national republic enough? Is virtue the principal of our government? Is honor? Or is ambition and avarice, adulation, baseness, covetousness, the thirst for riches, indifference concerning the means of rising and enriching, the contempt of principle, the spirit of party and of faction the motive and principle that governs?

From a letter by John Adams”
― David McCullough, John Adams

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”
― Pat Conroy