Laurie Thurston > Laurie's Quotes

“When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“The simplest answer is to act.”
― A.S. King, Everybody Sees the Ants

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
― T.S. Eliot

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“From a Berkeley Notebook'
~Denis Johnson

One changes so much
from moment to moment
that when one hugs
oneself against the chill
air at the inception
of spring, at night,
knees drawn to chin,
he finds himself in the arms
of a total stranger,
the arms of one he might move
away from on the dark playground.

Also, it breaks the heart
that the sign revolving like
a flame above the gas
station remembers the price
of gas, but forgets entirely
this face it has been
looking at all day.
And so the heart is exhausted
that even the face

of the dismal facts we wait
for the loves of the past
to come walking from the fire,
the tree, the stone, tangible
and unchanged and repentant
but what can you do.
Half the time I think
about my wife and child,
the other half I think how
to become a citizen

with an apartment, and sex
too is quite on my mind,
though it seems the women
have no time for you here,
for which in my larger, more
mature moments I can’t blame them.
These are the absolute

Pastures I am led to:
I am in Berkeley, California,
trapped inside my body,
I am the secret my body
is going to keep forever,
as if its secret were
merely silence. It lies
between two mistakes
of the earth,

the San Andreas
and Hayward faults,
and at night from
the hill above the stadium
where I sleep,
I can see the yellow
aurora of Telegraph
Avenue uplifted

by the holocaust.
My sleeping
bag has little
cowboys lassoing bulls
embroidered all over
its pastel inner
lining, the pines are tall
and straight, converging
in a sort of roof

above me, it’s nice,
oh loves, oh loves, why
aren’t you here? Morgan,
my pyjamas are so
lonesome without
the orangutans—I write
and write, and transcend
nothing, escape
nothing, nothing
is truly born from me,
yet magically it’s better
than nothing—I know

you must be quite
changed by now, but you
are just the same, too,
like those stars that keep
shining for a long time after
they go out—but it’s just a light
they touch us with this
evening amid the fine
rain like mist, among the pines.”
― Denis Johnson, The Incognito Lounge: And Other Poems