NB > NB's Quotes

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#1

“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections

10974 likes

#2

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

tags: creativity, invention, quip, wings, writing

4381 likes

#3

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”
― Joss Whedon

tags: writing

2645 likes

#4

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

tags: art, arts-and-humanities, creative-process, writing

4463 likes

#5

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

tags: writing

2974 likes

#6

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

tags: poetry, prose, writing

2806 likes

#7

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

tags: reading, writing

2543 likes

#8

“Tears are words that need to be written.”
― Paulo Coelho

tags: inspirational, sadness, writing

3119 likes

#9

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

tags: criticism, humor, writing

2049 likes

#10

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
― Mark Twain

tags: austen, criticism, reading, writing

1634 likes

#11

“Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.

Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.

Their language has been lost.

But not the gestures.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

tags: attention, bark, gestures, hear, hearing, listen, nature, paying-attention, perception, root, roots, secret, secrets, speaking, speech, tree, tree-parable, trees

208 likes

#13

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”
― Shel Silverstein

tags: dreamer, imagination, liar, make-believe, poetry, wisher, wishes

3790 likes

#14

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

tags: character, empowerment, flaws, freedom, gender, identity, image, independence, integrity, realism, self-awareness, self-determination, women

13928 likes

#15

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

tags: writing-life

1676 likes

#16

“We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.”
― Walter Mosley, Blue Light

tags: change, growth

2147 likes

#17

“To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.”
― Victor Hugo

2715 likes

#18

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

tags: hate, love

8092 likes

#19

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

tags: change, human

5445 likes

#20

“Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.”
― Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

2447 likes

#21

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
― John Muir

tags: nature

2554 likes

#22

“Most humans, in varying degrees, are already dead. In one way or another they have lost their dreams, their ambitions, their desire for a better life. They have surrendered their fight for self-esteem and they have compromised their great potential. They have settled for a life of mediocrity, days of despair and nights of tears. They are no more than living deaths confined to cemeteries of their choice. Yet they need not remain in that state. They can be resurrected from their sorry condition. They can each perform the greatest miracle in the world. They can each come back from the dead...”
― Og Mandino, The Greatest Miracle in World

tags: choice, choices, mediocrity, miracle, potential, potential-for-greatness, settle, settle-for-less

110 likes

#23

“I’m happy, and I intend to stay that way! I was born happy, I love people, I have a trusting nature, and I’d like everyone else to be happy too. Your”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition

3 likes

#24

“The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature's beauty and simplicity.

As long as this exists, and that should be forever, I know that there will be solace for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances. I firmly believe that nature can bring comfort to all who suffer.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

tags: alone, beauty, comfort, fear, happy, healing, lonely, nature, simplicity, solace, suffering

14 likes

#25

“I ignored your aura but it grabbed me by the hand, like the moon pulled the tide, and the tide pulled the sand.”
― Talib Kweli

tags: inspirational-love, love, moon, sand

53 likes

#26

“She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by-
And never knew.”
― Shel Silverstein, Every Thing on It

tags: fear, masks

1956 likes

#27

“The human race has the capacity to render itself extinct unless alternatives are found to the patterns of intraspecific warfare that have dominated civilized history. Ours has long been a predatory species. Living, for humans, depends upon the ability to kill as clearly as it does for lions or wolves. But lions and wolves, like almost all predatory species, normally limit their killing to prey animals, and they are equipped with elaborate ritual precautions to prevent the destruction of their own kind. Humans appear to be unique among predators in their enthusiasm to destroy members of their own species. Perhaps this unusual behavior can be attributed to some genetic deficiency which may lead humans ultimately to join the rest of nature's failures in the biological graveyard of extinction. Or perhaps our willingness to kill ourselves, like so many of our other problems, is something we have devised by misusing our enlarged brains.”
― Joseph W. Meeker

tags: comedy, ecology, humor, tragedy

2 likes

#28

“The sea is a desert of waves,
A wilderness of water.”
― Langston Hughes, Selected Poems

tags: ocean, poetry, sea, water, waves, wilderness

128 likes

#29

“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

3643 likes