Ellis Vidler > Ellis's Quotes

“Bad decisions make good stories.
--from an Internet list.”
― Ellis Vidler

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

“Why do we write?
"To make suffering endurable
To make evil intelligible
To make justice desirable
and . . . to make love possible”
― Roger Rosenblatt, Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing

“At the prosecution table, Flagler gave me his Ivy League snicker. If I wanted, I could dangle him out the window by his ankles. But then, I was picking up penalties for late hits while he was singing tenor with the Whiffenpoofs. Okay, so I’m not Yale Law Review, but I’m proud of my diploma. University of Miami. Night division. Top half of the bottom third of my class.”
― Paul Levine, Lassiter

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“The most enjoyable book in the world is the phone book, because think of all the sex that went into creating the content.”
― Jarod Kintz, 99 Cents For Some Nonsense

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Omit needless words.”
― William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style; How to Speak and Write Correctly

“If it’s the last kiss, we’d better make it last. I hope you don’t have anywhere to be, because I have the rest of my life free.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale