Abby > Abby's Quotes

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
― Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married

“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

“Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
― Paul Theroux

“Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.”
― Judith Thurman

“Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Pay heed to the tales of old wives. It may well be that they alone keep in memory what it was once needful for the wise to know.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…”
― Egon Schiele