CJ > CJ's Quotes

“It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.”
― Adlai E. Stevenson

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Never laugh at live dragons.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“One by one, she conjured all the boxes she'd been put into: The good girl box and the good Christian box...the mistress box...the bad daughter and fallen woman boxes...She saw with a painful blaze of clarity that every one of these boxes had been of her own making, either by consent or lack of resistance. She had no right to bitterness; she had put herself in them. And she would get herself out, she vowed. And once she was out, she'd never willingly climb into another box again.”
― Hillary Jordan, When She Woke

“Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.”
― Carol Shields, The Republic of Love

“If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose.”
― Gene Stratton-Porter, A Girl of the Limberlost

“The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!”
― Wilkie Collins, Armadale

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.”
― Jack London, The Turtles of Tasman

“Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.”
― Alice Walker, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems

“The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“All serious daring starts from within.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“If you obey all of the rules, you miss all of the fun.”
― Katharine Hepburn

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

“It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.”
― Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life

“We live in an era where opinion is currency. The pressure is on us to say 'I like this' or 'I don't like that', to make snap decisions and stick them on our credit cards. But when faced with something we cannot comprehend at once, which was never intended to be snapped up or whizzed through, perhaps 'I don't like it' is an inadequate response. Don't like Middlemarch? It doesn't matter. It was here before we arrived, and will be here long after we have gone. Instead, perhaps we should have the humility to say: I didn't get it. I need to try harder.”
― Andy Miller

“Is it wrong to prefer books to people? Not at Christmas. A book is like a guest you have invited into your home, except you don't have to play Pictionary with it or supply it with biscuits and stollen.”
― Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
― James Dickey

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish.”
― Terry Southern

“You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful: Yourself.”
― Alan Alda

“[B]egin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in.”
― Alan Alda, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet -- you've not got your niche in creation.
~ The Well of Loneliness, 1928 ”
― Radclyffe Hall

“She said she had seen her whole imagination right there in that water, glimmering out toward the endless horizon line.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“Actions and local occurrences said to indicate witchcraft included nonpayment of rent, demand for public assistance, giving the “evil-eye,” local die-offs of horses or other stock, and mysterious deaths of children. Also among the telltale actions were practices related to midwifery and any kind of contraception.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States