Court Ellyn > Court's Quotes

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“Everything is research.”
― Court Ellyn

“Writers by nature are subversive, observant, and discerning, and their voice contains that.”
― Amy Tan

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the tools to write.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writing is the balloon that keeps me floating among the clouds. Without it, all is darkness and hard ground and piles of dishes to wash.”
― Court Ellyn

“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in--what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom. ”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness. We pardon to the extent that we love. Love is knowing that even when you are alone, you will never be lonely again. & great happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. Loved for ourselves. & even loved in spite of ourselves.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

“Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it. (pg. 231)”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness. (Monseigneur Bienvenu in _Les Miserables_)”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“We pray together, we are afraid together, and then we go to sleep. Even if Satan came into the house, no one would interfere. After all, what is there to fear in this house? There is always one with us who is the strongest. Satan may visit our house, but the good Lord lives here.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“He did not study God; he was dazzled by him.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Let me be mad, then, by all means! mad with the madness of Absinthe, the wildest, most luxurious madness in the world! Vive la folie! Vive l'amour! Vive l'animalisme! Vive le Diable!”
― Marie Corelli, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris

“Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can step out of a railway station—the Gare D'Orsay—and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees—nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?”
― Margaret Anderson

“You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”
― Rumi

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
― Rumi

“I said: what about my eyes?
He said: Keep them on the road.

I said: What about my passion?
He said: Keep it burning.

I said: What about my heart?
He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?

I said: Pain and sorrow.
He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
― Rumi

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi