Roberta > Roberta's Quotes

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
― Winston Churchill

“A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.”
― Winston S. Churchill

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

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”
― Margaret Atwood

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979)”
― Jack McClelland, Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters

“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“A torn jacket is soon mended, but hard words bruise the heart of a child.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight,
but they, while their companions slept,
were toiling upward in the night.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The heart, like the mind, has a memory.
And in it are kept the most precious keepsakes.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
― Mark Twain

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”
― Charles Dickens

“No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

“What greater gift than the love of a cat.”
― Charles Dickens

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde