E.A. Lawrence > E.A.'s Quotes

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“But I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.”
― Chris Abani

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone.
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.”
― Adam Lindsay Gordon

“You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”
― Ivan Turgenev

“I like good strong words that mean something…”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“The world is so strange that maybe it’s perfectly logical.”
― Beth Lisick

“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

“Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”
― Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky and Other Poems

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”
― Colette

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
― Gertrude Stein

“Comedy is the blues for people who can’t sing.”
― Chris Rock

“She wanted something to happen - something, anything: she did not know what.”
― Kate Chopin

“For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society.”
― LeVar Burton

“Everyone forgets Icarus also flew.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“That which you believe becomes your world.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come

“Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. ”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!

“Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“There is a wilderness we walk alone
However well-companioned”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, Western Star