L.B. > L.B.'s Quotes

“As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

No ... eight days a week.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Thinking very often resembles napping, but the intent is different. --Stephanie Plum”
― Janet Evanovich, Seven Up

“Librarians are your very best friend. And don't ever think otherwise.”
― Rett MacPherson

“What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.”
― Thomas Wolfe

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“The difference between you and God is that God doesn't think He's you. ”
― Anne Lamott

“Describing his technique to Robert Frost, Clarke said "I load myself down with chains and try to wriggle free.”
― Austin Clarke, The Vengeance of Fionn

“Robert Frost at Eighty"

I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known.
I would like to find them.
They are not on the greying paper of old books
or chanted on obscure lips.
They are not in the language of mermaids
or the sharp-tongued adjectives of vanishing.
They run like torn threads along paving stones.
They are cracked as the skull of an old man.
They stir in the mirror
at fifty,
at eighty.
My ear keeps trying to hear them
but the seafront is cold.
The tide moves in.
They migrate like crows at a cricket ground.
They knock at the door when I am out.

I have done with craft.
How can I front ghosts with cleverness,
the slick glide of paradox and rhyme
that transforms prejudice
to brittle gems of seeming wisdom?

Though I bury all I own or hold close
though my skin outlives the trees
though the lines fall shattering the stone
I cannot catch them.
They have the lilting accent
of a house I saw but never entered.
They are the sounds a child hears –
the water, the afternoon, the sky.
I watch them now
trickling through the open mirror.
Sometimes, but almost never
we touch what we desire.”
― Peter Boyle