Jon > Jon's Quotes

“Maybe we are all cabinets of wonders.”
― Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

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

“Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.”
― Walter Kirn, Mission to America

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

“I'm happy. Which often looks like crazy.”
― David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

“O beautiful for spacious skies
for amber waves of grain”
― Katharine Lee Bates

“Life, a good life, a great life is about "Why not?" May we never forget it.”
― Danielle Steel, Happy Birthday

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“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

“We must love one another or die”
― W.H. Auden

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

“Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy.”
― Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree

“The proof of the pudding is the eating.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.”
― Rick Moody

“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.”
― Bill Nye

“Face front, true believers!”
― Stan Lee

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“And he could not tell why the struggle was worthwhile, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed...

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

I know myself," he cried, "But that is all.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Ours was a generation grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken" --”
― F.Scott Fitzgerald

“Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense, someone must cry: "Thou shalt not!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There are certain things which are human nature," he asserted with an owl-like look, "which always have been and always will be, which can't be changed."

Amory looked from the small man to the big man helplessly. "Listen to that! That's what makes me discouraged with progress. Listen to that! I can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of man--a hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held in check by civilization. What this man here just said has been for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated mutton-heads of the world. It negates the efforts of every scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity's service. It's a flat impeachment of all that's worth while in human nature. Every person over twenty-five years old who makes that statement in cold blood ought to be deprived of the franchise.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise