Amy > Amy's Quotes

“The main thing is to WRITE. Some days it might be 2000 words. Some days you might tinker with two sentences until you get them just right. Both days belong in the writing life. Some days you may watch a ‘Doctor Who’ marathon or become immersed in a book that is so good you can’t stop reading. Some days you may be in love or in mourning. Those days belong in the writing life, too. Live them without guilt.”
― L.K. Madigan

“Fear of what other people think should never dictate whether or not you do something.”
― L.K. Madigan, Flash Burnout

“A person can live a little bit broken...Most of us do, I guess.”
― Rosanne Parry, Heart of a Shepherd

“Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need.”
― Frederick Buechner

“The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.”
― Katherine Paterson

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“I wanted it to be so pure. Nothing is ever pure.”
― Emily Whitman

“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
― Richard Rohr

“Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“Rooster said, "Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!" and he took the reins in his teeth and pulled the other saddle revolver and drove his spurs into the flanks of his strong horse Bo and charged directly at the bandits. It was a sight to see. He held the revolvers wide on either side of the head of his plunging steed. The four bandits accepted the challenge and they likewise pulled their arms and charged their ponies ahead.”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“He said, “You are lucky to be traveling in a place where a spring is so handy. In my country you can ride for days and see no ground water. I have lapped filthy water from a hoofprint and was glad to have it. You don’t know what discomfort is until you have nearly perished for water.” Rooster said, “If I ever meet one of you Texas waddies that says he never drank from a horse track I think I will shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar.”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
― Herman Melville

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.”
― Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“The world is simply a better place when there are more voices in the room.”
― Deborah Jacobs, Stone Gathering: A Reader, Volume 2: Issue 2

“We’re all different, but we all think everyone else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel like the world would be a much happier place.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“Today, in the developed world, the great threat to political order is that people will pay attention to their surroundings. Thus, even slaves have access to entertainment.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [with Biographical Introduction]