Jen > Jen's Quotes

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.”
― Dorothy Parker

“You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.”
― Dorothy Parker, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ”
― Brenda Ueland

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

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”
― Sylvia Plath

“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst--symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus--this lovely thing itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace--this live thing which, if I might, I would have running through my room, yea, babbling along my table--this water is its own self its own truth, and is therein a truth of God.”
― George Macdonald

“The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.”
― Raymond Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems

“Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

“Sometimes losing a pet is more painful than losing a human because in the case of the pet, you were not pretending to love it.”
― Amy Sedaris, Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People

“I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

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

“So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
― Annie Proulx

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

“To say that I enjoyed writing... is like saying I enjoy having fingers and toes. It's difficult to imagine life without them.”
― Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia

“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”
― Junot Diaz

“You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."

[Becoming a Writer/ The List, O Magazine, November 2009]”
― Junot Diaz