Alyssa > Alyssa's Quotes

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  • #1
    “I think insomnia is a sign that a person is interesting.”
    Avery Sawyer, Notes to Self

  • #2
    Laini Taylor
    “I don't know many rules to live by,' he'd said. 'But here's one. It's simple. Don't put anything unnecessary into yourself. No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles--drug or tattoo--and...no inessential penises either.'

    'Inessential penises?' Karou had repeated, delighted with the phrase in spite of her grief. 'Is there any such thing as an essential one?'

    'When an essential one comes along, you'll know,' he'd replied.”
    Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

  • #3
    Michelle Tea
    “I will meet you in the dirtiest city you can dream of. We will drink cocktails so sweet they pucker our cheeks, as we perch on cracked leather bar stools. I will buy you plates of calcium and protein and we will run through the streets in excellent danger.

    Michelle Tea

  • #4
    Richard Siken
    “Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
    These, our bodies, possessed by light.
    Tell me we'll never get used to it.”
    Richard Siken, Crush

  • #5
    Stephen  King
    “The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
    Stephen King

  • #6
    Aldous Huxley
    “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
    Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

  • #7
    C.S. Lewis
    “You can make anything by writing.”
    C.S. Lewis

  • #8
    Franz Kafka
    “Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
    Franz Kafka

  • #9
    Toni Morrison
    “Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.”
    Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

  • #10
    John Steinbeck
    “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
    John Steinbeck

  • #11
    Thomas Mann
    “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
    Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

  • #12
    Carl Sagan
    “A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
    Carl Sagan

  • #13
    Charles Bukowski
    “great writers are indecent people
    they live unfairly
    saving the best part for paper.

    good human beings save the world
    so that bastards like me can keep creating art,
    become immortal.
    if you read this after I am dead
    it means I made it.”
    Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

  • #14
    George Orwell
    “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
    George Orwell, Why I Write

  • #15
    Margaret Atwood
    “The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
    Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

  • #16
    Margaret Atwood
    “Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”
    Margaret Atwood

  • #17
    Sylvia Plath
    “Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #18
    Anthony Burgess
    “We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”
    Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

  • #19
    Sidney Sheldon
    “A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.”
    Sidney Sheldon

  • #20
    Charles Bukowski
    “some moments are nice, some are
    nicer, some are even worth
    writing
    about.”
    Charles Bukowski, War All the Time: Poems 1981 - 1984

  • #21
    Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
    “I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .”
    Kurt Vonnegut, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut

  • #22
    Leonard Cohen
    “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
    Leonard Cohen

  • #23
    Voltaire
    “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”
    Voltaire

  • #24
    Carlos Ruiz Zafón
    “A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”
    Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

  • #25
    Flannery O'Connor
    “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.”
    Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

  • #26
    Allen Ginsberg
    “Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.”
    Allen Ginsberg

  • #27
    John Green
    “The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.”
    John Green

  • #28
    “Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.”
    Joss Whedon

  • #29
    Tim O'Brien
    “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”
    Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

  • #30
    Patrick Rothfuss
    “If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.”
    Patrick Rothfuss



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