Sandi Layne > Sandi's Quotes

“A good editor is like a pair of Spanx: firming up the body, making the subject look good, and absolutely invisible.”
― Sandi Layne

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”
― Steve Martin

“It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little friend on such weary travels: but if I can't do better, how is it to be helped? Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"

I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was still.

"Because, he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, - you'd forget me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”
― Stephen King

“If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.”
― Stephen King

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
― Abigail Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

“...he couldn't help but wonder what Hannah might have looked like if...he'd answered that question April had asked him years ago.”
― Sandi Layne, Romantic Interludes

“Then, as now, it was just uncomfortable. Now, as then, it was a lifted chin and a crooked smile that said more than they would ever allow themselves to communicate.”
― Sandi Layne, Romantic Interludes

“Go back to bed, Cowan. I want no promises from you.”
― Sandi Layne, Éire's Captive Moon

“All good things originate with the Creator God, he'd been taught, and the Song of Life was no exception.”
― Sandi Layne, Éire's Captive Moon

“Cowan son of Branieucc, you're the only one of my people that I know for sure still lives.”
― Sandi Layne, Éire's Captive Moon

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
― Mark Twain

“Buried deep-deep under that teenage boy exterior, you, Sebastian Hawkins, are a sweetheart.”
― Nyrae Dawn

“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Before you can change what is coming out of your mouth you will need a change of heart.”
― Dave Moore, The Father's Love: Amid a Frantic Search for His Son, a Father Finds His Faith

“Babies are soft. Anyone looking at them can see the tender, fragile skin and know it for the rose-leaf softness that invites a finger's touch. But when you live with them and love them, you feel the softness going inward, the round-cheeked flesh wobbly as custard, the boneless splay of the tiny hands. Their joints are melted rubber, and even when you kiss them hard, in the passion of loving their existence, your lips sink down and seem never to find bone. Holding them against you, they melt and mold, as though they might at any moment flow back into your body.

But from the very start, there is that small streak of steel within each child. That thing that says "I am," and forms the core of personality.

In the second year, the bone hardens and the child stands upright, skull wide and solid, a helmet protecting the softness within. And "I am" grows, too. Looking at them, you can almost see it, sturdy as heartwood, glowing through the translucent flesh.

The bones of the face emerge at six, and the soul within is fixed at seven. The process of encapsulation goes on, to reach its peak in the glossy shell of adolescence, when all softness then is hidden under the nacreous layers of the multiple new personalities that teenagers try on to guard themselves.

In the next years, the hardening spreads from the center, as one finds and fixes the facets of the soul, until "I am" is set, delicate and detailed as an insect in amber.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber

“To write is human, to edit is divine.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him once long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The Reverend Mother must combine the seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin goddess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her youth endure. For when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the place-between, once occupied by tension, has become a wellspring of cunning and resourcefulness.  ”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
― Mark Twain

“Curiouser and curiouser!”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland