Ling > Ling's Quotes

“For the past has taught
to not be caught,
in what is not
worth pursuing—”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“I don't think all writers are sad, she said.
I think it's the other way around—
all sad people write.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.”
― Randall Munroe, xkcd: volume 0

“I mean, mentally you brace yourself for the ending of a novel. As you're reading, you're aware of the fact that there's only a page or two left in the book, and you get ready to close it. but with a film there's no way of telling, especially nowadays, when films are much more loosely structured, much more ambivalent, than they used to be. There's no way of telling which frame is going to be the last. The film is going along, just as life goes along, people are behaving, doing things, drinking, talking, and we're watching them, and at any point the director chooses, without warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can just...end.”
― David Lodge, Changing Places

“He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future

“If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes
one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Faith is taking the first step even when you can't see the whole staircase.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“I think if I've learned anything about friendship, it's to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don't walk away, don't be distracted, don't be too busy or tired, don't take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together. Powerful stuff.”
― Jon Katz

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find.”
― William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim

“Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.”
― Corrie ten Boom

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.”
― C.S. Lewis

“In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”
― C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

“In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble--because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out." - Mere Christianity”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“this is a book about something”
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

“When I was younger, I often thought I should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that I should be in a constant state of velocity so that I could get out of there and truly live, but with time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money bobs that turned into my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people I meet when I allow my gaze to linger. I'm writing again after the fever, as if an old, welcome wound has opened and started to bleed, and I guess it's an incomplete puzzle, these pictures of others and whoever they end up portraying. . . . 'Soon it will be too late,' [Sally] says, and hands me the thermos. 'And that's why we have to exert ourselves to the utmost.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“Her Aunt Rose lightly grabbed hold of True’s hand and kissed the back of her palm. “She loved you more than anything in the world and you did her. Just the way it is supposed to be. She never expected to be gone, you know. She dreamed of seeing you grow up. She was the only person I know that would get excited about growing old. I wish I could tell you that the hurt stops, but I can’t. Although, as impossible as it seems, one day it will hurt a little less.”
― Alexia D. Miller, Crystal Key: Door to a New World

“Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84