Linda > Linda's Quotes

“I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”
― Colette

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
― François Rabelais

“The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear”
― Aung San Suu Kyi

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie

“Have you, in truth, ever seen something so heartbreakingly lovely? What are we to make of a world where stars shine bright in the midst of so much darkness and gloom?”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Magician's Elephant

“Magic is always impossible. It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That's why it is magic.”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Magician's Elephant

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Claire Waverley has started a successful new venture, Waverley’s Candies. Though her handcrafted confections—rose to recall lost love, lavender to promote happiness and lemon verbena to soothe throats and minds—are singularly effective, the business of selling them is costing her the everyday joys of her family, and her belief in her own precious gifts.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

“Maybe it’s true that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But you’d go mad reading all of their rough drafts,”
― James Browning, The Fracking King

“Clutter, either mental or physical, is the sign of a healthy curiosity.”
― Christopher Fowler, The Memory of Blood

“A book is a little thing that is bigger on the inside, and makes the reader bigger inside as well, a Tardis of ink and glue and paper and words.”
― Stuart Kelly

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.”
― Neil Gaiman

“A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else's head. You see out of the world through somebody else's eyes. It's very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you've just read a book by one of those people.”
― Neil Gaiman

“My last thought before falling asleep was that we are all a lot more capable of conquering obstacles and fears than we think.”
― Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”
― Gary Provost

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
― Annie Proulx

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“It is far cheaper to build schoolhouses than prisons, and it is much better to have scholars than convicts.”
― Robert Ingersoll

“Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.”
― Greg Iles, The Footprints of God

“And how shall I think of you?' He considered a moment and then laughed. 'Think of me with my nose in a book!”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!”
― Connie Willis, Passage