Juniper > Juniper's Quotes

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“When I was your age, television was called books.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
― Frida Kahlo

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about. ”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential.”
― Kofi Annan

“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“There are very few innocent sentences in writing.”
― David Foster Wallace

“There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was.

(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)”
― Colm Tóibín, The Modern Library : The Two Hundred Best Novels in English Since 1950

“The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“But I did not want to be good. I wanted to be a writer.”
― Isabel Huggan, Belonging: Home Away from Home

“If there were nothing else, reading would--obviously--be worth living for.”
― Nuala O'Faolain, Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman

“Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Two Much

“(..)Fate has al­ways been a po­tent force in Rus­sia, where, for gen­er­ations, cit­izens have had lit­tle con­trol over their own des­tinies. Fate can be a bitch, but, as Za­it­sev, Dvornik, and Onofre­cuk had dis­cov­ered, it can al­so be a tiger.”
― John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time...give it, give it all, give it now.”
― Annie Dillard

“Well darling, we're all terminal, aren't we?”
― Nancy Jo Cullen, Canary

“Dear other iterations of my past self, Thank you for not being so goddamn weird that I felt I had to address you personally in a letter from the future. I commend you.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“I am different, not less.”
― Temple Grandin

“Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“I feel clobbered by the impossibility of translating into words as much of this enormous world we live in with its subtly complex and sprawling Periodic Table of emotions. To quote Freddie Mercury, I want it all.”
― David Mitchell

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be.”
― Temple Grandin

“The constant happiness is curiosity.”
― Alice Munro

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment