Tim Evanson > Tim's Quotes

“We are always in a hurry to be happy...; for when we have suffered a long time, we have great difficulty in believing in good fortune.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Of course, the writer can impose control; It's just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called "plotting." Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however... that is called "storytelling." Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.”
― Stephen King

“What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“The library is not, as some would have it, a place for the retiring of disposition or faint of heart. It is not an ivory tower or a quiet room in a sanitarium facing away from the afternoon sun. It is, rather, a command center, a power base. A board room, a war room. An Oval Office for all who preside over their own destinies. One does not retreat from the world here; one prepares to join it at an advantage.”
― Eric Burns, Joy of Books

“Though I could agree with him that Miss Gamache had a good heart, I couldn't read her book without wanting to plunge an ice pick into it while screaming, 'That's for chapter four!”
― Joe Keenan, My Lucky Star

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.”
― Christopher Morley

“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
― William Blake

“If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”
― Harvey Milk

“Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.”
― George Saunders

“Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"

“What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.”
― Chris Abani

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

“The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.”
― Henry Miller

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.”
― Tom Bodett

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”
― Ivan Turgenev

“Truth crushed to earth shall rise again.”
― William Cullen Bryant

“Oh, Life, I am yours. Whatever it is you want of me, I am ready to give.”
― William Steig, Dominic

“You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”
― Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980

“Everyone forgets Icarus also flew.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“Spring is the time of plans and projects.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.”
― Emile Zola

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner