Jessica McCann > Jessica's Quotes

“Like works of literature, mathematical ideas help expand our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial point of view.”
― Daniel Tammet Thinking in Numbers How Maths Illuminates Our Lives

“The hardest choices in life aren't between what's right and what's wrong but between what's right and what's best.”
― Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

“If you’re going to risk and maybe fail, fail at something that matters. Fail gloriously so that even in failure, lives change.”
― Jon Acuff

“Too many of us are hung up on what we don't have, can't have, or won't ever have. We spend too much energy being down, when we could use that same energy – if not less of it – doing, or at least trying to do, some of the things we really want to do.”
― Terry McMillan , Disappearing Acts

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

“He was like a bottle and music was the wine.... She liked to be near him when it poured.”
― Carolina De Robertis, The Invisible Mountain

“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”
― Isak Dinesen

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“It was the moment of early spring like the pause when a fiddler has lifted his bow and holds it over the strings, ready to call forth the music.”
― Rosslyn Elliott, Fairer Than Morning

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“She was awake, alive, full of ideas like branches in a greenhouse, growing thick and rife against the glass.”
― Carolina De Robertis, The Invisible Mountain

“My children ain’t the only thing I love. If I was allowed, I reckon I’d love myself, too.”
― Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Wench

“If summer had a flavor, it was pink bubble gum.”
― Sarah Jio, The Violets of March

“There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.”
― Stephen King

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“How much this book of life changes, he thought. And we are not the ones to write the pages.”
― Naomi Benaron, Running the Rift

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books.
The book needs you.”
― Gary Paulsen, The Winter Room

“Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Two Much

“No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.”
― Eugene Field

“I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.”
― Rick Moody

“I can turn to that day as though it were a page in a book. It’s written so deeply upon my mind I can almost taste the ink.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“Books remember all the things you cannot contain.”
― Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant's House

“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”
― Aldo Leopold

“There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”
― Aldo Leopold

“We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
― Aldo Leopold

“I know of a cure for everything: salt water...in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
― Karen Blixen

“The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear”
― Aung San Suu Kyi

“We are surrounded by story.”
― Alice McDermott

“Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies...”
― Eileen Chang