Marilyn Brant > Marilyn's Quotes

“The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.”
― John Burroughs

“I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.”
― John D. Rockefeller

“Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common.”
― Jane Austen

“The way you wear your hat,
The way you sip your tea,
The mem'ry of all that --
No, no! They can't take that away from me!”
― Ira Gershwin

“Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.”
― Samuel Butler

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
― Martin Buber

“XXIX

Traveler, there is no path.
The path is made by walking.

Traveller, the path is your tracks
And nothing more.
Traveller, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Traveller, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.”
― Antonio Machado, Border of a Dream: Selected Poems

“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns