Ann > Ann's Quotes

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."

(Keynote speech at Celebrating Inspiration luncheon with the WNBA's All-Decade Team, 2006)”
― Madeleine Albright

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
― Mark Twain

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
― Elmore Leonard

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”
― Maya Angelou

“I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
― Michael Jordan

“Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.”
― Dr. Seuss

“You know, some people say life is short and that you could get hit by a bus at any moment and that you have to live each day like it's your last. Bullshit. Life is long. You're probably not gonna get hit by a bus. And you're gonna have to live with the choices you make for the next fifty years.”
― Chris Rock

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”
― Albert Einstein

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.”
― Joe Biden

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“If I live a day and I don’t know a little more than I did the day before, I think I wasted that day.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.”
― Warren Buffett

“perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.”
― Barack Obama

“language is a thing that lives in the minds of individual humans at individual points in time, a thing that can’t be fully encompassed in a static list of rules like a game of chess.”
― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

“There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people all it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree that struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . Survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.”
― Betty Smith

“Respect the elders. Embrace the new. Encourage the impractical and improbable, without bias.”
― David Fricke

“To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pick up other people’s trash.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“Only godless savages eschew the series comma.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“We get smarter and more creative as we age, research shows. Our brain's anatomy, neural networks, and cognitive abilities can actually improve with age and increased life experiences. Contrary to the mythology of Silicon Valley, older employees may be even more productive, innovative, and collaborative than younger ones... Most people, in fact, have multiple cognitive peaks throughout their lives.”
― Rich Karlgaard, Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement

“It [puberty] is not that you lose control of your body so much as that you lose control over the way your body is interpreted. Your body becomes an alien body, a question rather than a statement.”
― Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages