Tamara > Tamara's Quotes

“I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head. Love is an illusion, but I would willingly fall for it if I could believe in it. Now everything seems either far and sad and cold, like a piece of shale at the bottom of a canyon - or warm and near and unthinking, like the pink dogwood.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I even read aloud the part of the novel I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.
When they said, 'It's great, Ernest. Truly, it's great. You cannot know the thing it has," I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the fiesta concept of life to see if I could not bring some attractive stick back, instead of thinking, 'If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?' That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:
ETC.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
― Tom Robbins

“...disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business....”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record, it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”
― Conan O'Brien

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
― Walt Whitman

“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“They laughed too, even Rose Dear shook her head and smiled, and suddenly the world was right side up. Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)”
― Patti Smith

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.”
― Tim Winton, The Turning

“There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
― John Steinbeck

“Look now -- in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "use it well, use it wisely." We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Then there were his education and his reading, the books he bought and borrowed, his knowledge of things that could not be eaten or worn or cohabited with, his interest in poetry and his respect for good writing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Will liked to live so that no one could find fault with him, and to do that he had to live as nearly like other people as possible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden