Karen > Karen's Quotes

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”
― Dr. Seuss

“It has often been said
there’s so much to be read,
you never can cram
all those words in your head.

So the writer who breeds
more words than he needs
is making a chore
for the reader who reads.

That's why my belief is
the briefer the brief is,
the greater the sigh
of the reader's relief is.

And that's why your books
have such power and strength.
You publish with shorth!
(Shorth is better than length.)”
― Dr. Seuss

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“O, there is lovely to feel a book, a good book, firm in the hand, for its fatness holds rich promise, and you are hot inside to think of good hours to come.”
― Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.”
― Dan Simmons, A Winter Haunting

“...speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world'...”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“This is every writer's nightmare--the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us...”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
― William Faulkner, Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech, 1949

“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”
― William Faulkner

“I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are. ”
― William Faulkner

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
― Anonymous Greek Proverb

“Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand.”
― Bodie Thoene