D.E. > D.E.'s Quotes

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Land of Heart's Desire

“I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. ”
― William Butler Yeats

“I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.
They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.”
― William Butler Yeats

“To love in spite of all is the secret of greatness. And may very well be the greatest secret in this universe.”
― L. Ron Hubbard

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“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 there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner