Blake Charlton > Blake's Quotes

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“The light of morning decomposes everything.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“Everyone may be ordinary, but they're not normal.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“[Francesca] 'You really are a few biscuits short of breakfast.'
His eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
'You're a few colors shy of a rainbow?' she offered. 'Not pulling a full wagon? Knitting with only one needle? All foam and no beer? Your cheese slid off the cracker? You couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel?'
[Nicodemus] 'All right. I get it.”
― Blake Charlton, Spellbound

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
― George R. R. Martin

“[Nicodemus] 'Magistra DeVega, can I ask for your help?'

[DeVega] 'You can ask,' she said with her usual calmness, 'but the clerics haven't developed a cure for death by idiotic leadership.”
― Blake Charlton, Spellbound

“That which is original creates a new origin. That which is original, by definition, must stray off the previously worn paths. It must wander; it must err.”
― Blake Charlton

“You spoke to Nicodemus?' Vivian asked.
[Francesca] 'We did.'
V: 'And he trusts you?'
F: 'As much as one might after a first impression involving hatchets.”
― Blake Charlton, Spellbound

“The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth.”
― George R.R. Martin

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Magistra, if you save my student, I don't care a snap what you say about my heart.
She snorted. "Typical of a man, caring only when an external organ is belittled.”
― Blake Charlton, Spellbound

“All my life, I've been trying to fill an emptiness inside. But that emptiness...I've built myself around it. Filling it in would be like filling in the empty space within a cathedral.”
― Blake Charlton, Spellbound

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
― Bob Marley

“I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.”
― Louis C.K.

“I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes

“You should laugh every moment you live, for you'll find it decidedly difficult afterwards.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold