Mekenzie Larsen > Mekenzie's Quotes

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“folk-tales are, at best, generally no more than lies set in rhyme.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.”
― William Gibson

“Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.”
― William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor

“Outside, the night lay coiled in the street, cobra-cold and scaled with stars.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Dreams are the language of God.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.”
― T.C. Boyle

“I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don't want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.”
― Charles de Lint

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“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

“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Ghosts can haunt damned near anything. I have heard them in the breathy voice of a song and seen them between the covers of a book. They have hidden in trees so that their faces peer out of the bark, and hovered beneath the silver surface of water. They disguise themselves as cracks in concrete or come calling in a delirium of fever. On summer days they keep pace like the shadow of our shadow. They lurk in the breath of young girls who give us our first kiss. I've seen men who were haunted to the point of madness by things that never were and things that should have been. I've seen ghosts in the lines on a woman's face and heard them in the jangling of keys. The ghosts in fire freeze and the ghosts in ice burn. Some died long ago; some were never born. Some ride the blood in my veins until it reaches my brain. Sometimes I even mistake myself for one. Sometimes I am one.”
― Damien Echols, Life After Death

“Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“The underground of the city is like what's underground in people. Beneath the surface, it's boiling with monsters.”
― Guillermo Del Toro

“I am what I am. I would tell you what you want to know if I could, for you have been kind to me. But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may lie amongst the common dead. I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young; and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?”
― Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“I don't like people. They fuck me up.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“Why' is a crooked letter and can't be made straight.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“Beyond the reach of human rage
A drop of hell, a touch of strange ...”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger