Tim Fredrick > Tim Fredrick's Quotes

“You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.”
― Ellen DeGeneres, The Funny Thing Is...

“Strength is the capacity to break a Hershey bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces.”
― Judith Viorst, Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life, Etc.

“My publishers, two Catalan brothers with an inherited income, took me out to lunch to inform me that the first print run would be only five hundred copies. Five hundred readers? I accept! And the lunch was delicious.”
― Francine Prose, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

“I dropped a word from the string of negative adjectives that had trailed behind me like tin cans behind the village idiot. Unappreciated, unloved, unmarried. But no longer unpublished.”
― Francine Prose, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

“I feel an immediate closeness to anyone who loves New York or hates Los Angeles. Either condition is sufficient, but I’ve found that satisfaction of the one usually entails satisfaction of the other.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem

“So for the sake of your identity,” she said, “you avoided using your real name, which effectively allowed someone else to use your real name and steal your identity.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“I can’t help but be attracted to pregnant women. Unless they’re malnourished. I’ll see a malnourished pregnant woman on the subway sometimes, big in the belly but with stick-figure arms and hair like a rat’s, and I want to buy her a space heater. I want to yell at her parents. I remember going up to this real malnourished-looking pregnant lady on the G train one time and asking her if she’d like a free dinner at Junior’s. She couldn’t believe I was trying to pick her up on the G train, a pregnant woman with a ring on her finger. I hadn’t noticed the ring. It was one hell of a big ring. I tried to convince her that I wasn’t trying to pick her up. I offered to give her fifty bucks for cooking oil. That just made matters worse. Turns out she was a famous model. I’ve seen her on billboards.”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“This is really what you want? To live with a poet?” “Yes,” she said. “With the hot plate? And the lice?”
― Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Minna sometimes imagined Dr. Upshaw having sex with her husband, lying there almost motionless, fat sticky thighs sagging on the bed, saying, “I think you’re onto something, David,” in her low, encouraging voice.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“She’s like a person looking through the wrong end of a telescope, complaining that everything looks small.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“In this box are all the words I know…Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is to use them well and in the right places.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person's unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.”
― Adam Haslett, You Are Not a Stranger Here

“There was another snowstorm, although immediately after, the sun came out and it was almost sixty degrees, so the snow melted. Nothing was real anymore; everything was over.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“I am a master of logic and a powerfully convincing debater. In fact, against my better judgment, I can talk myself out of doing anything.”
― Jarod Kintz, $3.33

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“You can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the neurotic, compulsively curious librarian out of the girl.”
― Molly Harper, Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
― Henry Ward Beecherr