Claire > Claire's Quotes

“I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.”
― Margery Allingham

“But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

“Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.”
― John F. Kennedy

“The inclination to believe in the fantastic may strike some as a failure in logic, or gullibility, but it’s really a gift. A world that might have Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster is clearly superior to one that definitely does not.”
― Chris Van Allsburg

“Work is more fun than fun.”
― Noel Coward

“It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips.”
― Mark Twain

“It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands . . . They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.”
― Thomas Merton

“There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”
― Oscar Levant

“Mrs. Ewing was a short woman who accepted the obligation borne by so many short women to make up in vivacity what they lack in number of inches from the ground.”
― Dorothy Parker, Men, Women and Dogs

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie

“Now it’s high watermark
and floodtide in the heart
and time to go.
The sea-nymphs in the spray
will be the chorus now.
What’s left to say?

Suspect too much sweet-talk
but never close your mind.
It was a fortunate wind
that blew me here. I leave
half-ready to believe
that a crippled trust might walk

and the half-true rhyme is love.”
― Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes

“Atticus said to Jem one day, "I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father’s right," she said. "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.”
― William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part Two

“Wendy," Peter Pan continued in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist, "Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

“There is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.”
― Stephen Fry

“I absolutely believe my talent is God-given. I ask God for a lot, but I also thank him. I'm a very demanding believer. ”
― Hubert de Givenchy

“I'm lazy. But it's the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn't like walking or carrying things. ”
― Lech Walesa

“Just when you're beginning to think pretty well of people, you run across somebody who puts sugar on sliced tomatoes.”
― Will Cuppy

“I think, writing-wise, I am probably more of a quilter than a weaver because I just get a little scrap here and a little scrap there and sew them together.”
― Rich Mullins

“There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968

“If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.”
― Leonard Cohen

“My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terrors for one who remembers the name.”
― Leonard Cohen