Melissa Maresca > Melissa's Quotes

“Eleanor looked up, surprised; the little girl was sliding back in her chair, sullenly refusing her milk, while her father frowned and her brother giggled and her mother said calmly, 'She wants her cup of stars.'

Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course.

'Her little cup,' the mother was explaining, smiling apologetically at the waitress, who was thunderstruck at the thought that the mill's good country milk was not rich enough for the little girl. 'It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk.' The waitress nodded, unconvinced, and the mother told the little girl, 'You'll have your milk from your cup of stars tonight when we get home. But just for now, just to be a very good little girl, will you take a little milk from this glass?'

Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don't do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Wide Window

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild;
He has devoured the infant child.
The infant child is not aware
It has been eaten by a bear."
"Infant Innocence”
― A.E. Housman

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers' meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.”
― A.E. Housman, More Poems

“Good creatures, do you love your lives
And have you ears for sense?
Here is a knife like other knives,
That cost me eighteen pence.

I need but stick it in my heart
And down will come the sky,
And earth's foundations will depart
And all you folk will die.”
― A.E. Housman, More Poems

“I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.”
― A.E. Housman

“Her strong enchantments failing,
Her towers of fear in wreck,
Her limbecks dried of poisons
And the knife at her neck,

The Queen of air and darkness
Begins to shrill and cry,
`O young man, O my slayer
To-morrow you shall die.'

O Queen of air and darkness
I think 'tis truth you say,
And I shall die to-morrow;
But you shall die to-day.”
― A.E. Houseman

“Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.”
― A.E. Housman

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
― Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”
― Bram Stoker

“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver

“You turn to me and ask, “Do you ever think about suicide?” I look away from you and close my eyes, eat the raspberries to confuse the blood in my mouth.”
― Joseph Fink, Mostly Void, Partially Stars

“Show me your witches, and I'll show you your feelings about women.”
― Pam Grossman, Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power

“If any of [my stories] succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.”
― M.R. James

“We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides.”
― Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life

“What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it's the closest thing to being God you're ever going to get. All the decisions are yours. You decide when the sun comes up. You decide who gets to fall in love and who gets hit by a car. You have to make all the trees and all the leaves and then sew the leaves onto the trees. You make the entire world.”
― Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life

“a woman raised her hand and said that her minister had told the congregation that they should never read novels with omniscient narrators, because the writer was trying to imitate God. “Really?” I said. “No Tolstoy? No Dickens?” The woman shook her head. I have to say it thrilled me to think that narrative structure was dangerous enough to rate its own Sunday sermon.) ”
― Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life

“I delight in what I fear.”
― Shirley Jackson

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket