Deborah > Deborah's Quotes

“There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“What are you?" I whispered.
He shrugged again.
"Something," he said. "Something like you, something like a beast, something like a bird, something like an angel." He laughed. "Something like that.”
― David Almond, Skellig

“Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”
― Isak Dinesen

“Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you. Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky. Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way. It is harder. It is not safe. But it is what you were born to.”
― Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels

“Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. ”
― Joan Aiken

“Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
― Mary Oliver

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“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

“What good are insights? They only make things worse.”
― Raymond Carver

“The past can't hurt you anymore. Not unless you let it. They made you into a victim, Evey. They made you into a statistic. But, that's not the real you. That's not who you are inside.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta