Yvonne Ventresca > Yvonne's Quotes

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

“Social media is just useless garbage until one random, serendipitous, meaningful connection happens and suddenly the whole world shifts.”
― Dan Blank

“The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.”
― Albert Einstein

“Worry is most often a prideful way of thinking that you have more control over life and its circumstances than you actually do.”
― June Hunt

“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking”
― Albert Einstein

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity”
― T.S. Eliot

“Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
― Gene Fowler

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

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.

Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that's permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.

If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.

Should I outlive this anguish, and men do,
I shall have only good to say of you.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision."

[FAQ - Advice to Authors on Gaiman's website, http://www.neilgaiman.com]”
― Neil Gaiman

“I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning.”
― William Faulkner

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“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

“[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.”
― Richard Peck

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
― Anthony Trollope

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”
― David Allen

“What you do everyday matters more than what you do once in a while.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.”
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

“But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?"
Yes . . . the same age you will be if you don't.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering 'it will be happier'...”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. Being brave means you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline