Michael > Michael's Quotes

“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Never say more than is necessary.”
― Richard Brinsley Sheridan

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth.”
― George R.R. Martin

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Google' is not a synonym for 'research'.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to Middle-earth.”
― George R.R. Martin

“Adventure is just bad planning.”
― Roald Amundsen

“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

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun. ”
― George Plimpton

“No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”
― Hal Borland

“The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything. He would even say it in English, “Wyrd biõ ful ãræd.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.”
― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“Life is a beautiful magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.”
― Charles Chaplin

“The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.”
― Paula Fox

“Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.”
― Sue Grafton, M is for Malice

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

“An excess of reason is itself a form of madness”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain

“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall