Leah > Leah's Quotes

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.”
― Max Frisch, Homo Faber

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I just make the best book that I can and try to not worry about audience or if it will sell. The odds are against you, so why abuse your talent for the sake of a chimera? The only real pleasure for me in writing comes from pleasing myself. What readers think is interesting and illuminating (and it may even be correct), but that is nothing compared to the excitement of seeing a world develop. Besides, even though I like most individuals I meet, I have a pretty low opinion of people in general. So if I were to write for people in general, I would have to drastically lower my estimation of the intelligence of my reader. Rather than doing that, I write the way it seems the book has to appear. I don’t think that’s egotistic. There are often things I would like to include in my books—things about me personally and other materials—that I feel I have to leave out because they aren’t relevant to the book. I’m fairly ruthless along those lines, because I try to let nothing come in the way of what’s best for the book. If that means that the book won’t sell or that a publisher won’t buy it, then that’s my problem. I’ll suffer for that, but I won’t let the book suffer for it.”
― William T. Vollmann

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Remind me again why I put up with you?"
''Cause you sold me your soul for five bucks, and now you must submit to my will?' I still had the sheet of paper, written in his untidy fifth-grade scrawl. Gideon David Belmonte. One soul.”
― Bethany Frenette, Dark Star

“Only do not forget, if I wake up crying
it's only because in my dream I'm a lost child

hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands....”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I already made icing. I told you not to buy any."
"Oops," I said, taking another scoop. "Looks like I messed up again. Guess I'll have to eat this."
He glanced toward me, giving a pointed look to the two containers I had set beside me. "All of it?" he asked.
"Maybe if you're nice, I'll share...But considering you've already met your niceness quote for the year, I wouldn't bet on it. And you can't have any sprinkles."
"There goes my reason for living."
"I thought that was to make me miserable.”
― Bethany Frenette, Dark Star

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“But...he's a demon. Isn't that sort of the main category of Things to Smite?”
― Bethany Frenette, Dark Star

“I loved Granny Belmonte, but she didn't need a costume to look undead.”
― Bethany Frenette, Dark Star

“And still the light kept coming. It poured out of me, boundless and violent. But even as it swelled, it didn't leave me. I felt myself moving with it, a part of it, moving through earth and air, soaking up shadow. And I felt connected to everything. I felt the city, the motion of engines and tires and feet, of doors opening, of throats trembling with sound. I smelled soil and snow, grease, garbage, sweat, breath, heat. I felt the earth, and everything beneath and Beneath.”
― Bethany Frenette, Dark Star

“We email, teleconference, webinar, but we are not in the room with the people. It is a false connectedness - artificial team-building. It's like eating the menu instead of the food.”
― Linda Robinson, Chantepleure

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.”
― Max Frisch

“The main thing is to stand up to the light, to joy (like our child) in the knowledge that I shall be extinguished in the light over gorse, asphalt, and sea, to stand up to time, or rather to eternity in the instant. To be eternal means to have existed.”
― Max Frisch, Homo Faber

“A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz

“She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
― Emily Dickinson

“
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“By the time they were pulling into the parking lot of the A&P, the mood was fading, the moment gone. Amy could feel it go. Perhaps it was nothing more than the two doughnuts expanding in her stomach full of milk, but Amy felt a heaviness begin, a familiar turning of some inward tide. As they drove over the bridge the sun seemed to move from a cheerful daytime yellow to an early-evening gold; painful how the gold light hit the riverbanks, rich and sorrowful, drawing from Amy some longing, a craving for joy.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle

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

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own