Patrick Brigham > Patrick's Quotes

“If you tell the truth you do not need a good memory!”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Ignorance is not a virtue, nor empty thoughts a pot of gold.”
― Patrick Brigham

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”
― Vita Sackville-West

“You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?”
― Edward Albee

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“Literature is news that stays news.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“It is never too late to be wise.”
― Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

“If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books.
The book needs you.”
― Gary Paulsen, The Winter Room

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.”
― Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys

“I am so far from being a pessimist...on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.”
― Eugene O'Neill

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

“You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.”
― O. Henry

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”
― Wole Soyinka

“Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, but only saps today of its strength.”
― A.J. Cronin

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“In the world I am
Always a stranger
I do not understand its language
It does not understand my silence”
― Bei Dao

“I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life”
― Diane di Prima

“Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.”
― Thor Heyerdahl

“The world is like that -- incomprehensible and full of surprises .”
― Jorge Amado, Gabriela, clavo y canela

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

“No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.”
― Maria Montessori

“No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.”
― Eugene Field

“One day might be different from another, but there ain't much difference when they're put together.”
― William H. Armstrong

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae