Deborah > Deborah's Quotes

“...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.”
― Susan Sontag

“You can keep your willpower, Frog. I am going home to bake a cake.”
― Arnold Lobel, Frog and Toad Together

“What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.”
― Mary McCarthy

“Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.”
― A.A. Milne

“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write”
― W.S. Merwin, Opening the Hand

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“If you're doing it right... you should feel while you're doing it that you're revealing a little too much of yourself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

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

“This door was once a colossal oak tree about three hugs around and as high as the blue.”
― Deborah Freedman, This House, Once