Glenda > Glenda's Quotes

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
― Stephen King

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.”
― Stephen King

“I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.”
― Stephen King

“Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”
― Stephen King

“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

“There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.”
― Stephen King

“Friends.
They aren’t any such thing as good friend or bad friend.
Maybe there are just friend.
People who stand by you when you're hurt and who helped you feel not so lonely.
Maybe there are worth being scared for and hoping for and living for.
Maybe worth dying for too.
If that what has to be.
No bad friends.
Only people you want.
Need to be with.
People who build their houses in your heart.”
― Stephen King

“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“We lie best when we lie to ourselves.”
― Stephen King, It

“Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity”
― Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”
― David Foster Wallace, Up, Simbal!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”
― David Foster Wallace

“If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Every man has within himself the entire human condition”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head”
― Michel de Montaigne

“There is no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally.”
― MONTAIGNE

“There is no desire more natural than the desire of knowledge. (Il n'est desir plus naturel que le desir de connaissance)”
― Michel de Montaigne, Essays

“We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection

“Other people do not see you at all, but guess at you by uncertain conjectures.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Kings and philosophers shit—and so do ladies.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Don't discuss yourself, for you are bound to lose; if you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.”
― Michel de Montaigne