Lan > Lan's Quotes

“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

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

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

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history’s illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.”
― Lauren Willig

“Do you think amethysts can be the souls of good violets?”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“It is helpful to know the proper way to behave, so one can decide whether or not to be proper.”
― Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted

“I hope your bacon burns.”
― Diana Wynne Jones , Howl’s Moving Castle

“I have plucked snowdrops at Midwinter, died at my own choosing, and wept for a nightingale. Now I am beyond prophecy.”
― Katherine Arden, The Winter of the Witch

“There are no monsters in the world, and no saints. Only infinite shades woven into the same tapestry, light and dark. One man’s monster is another man’s beloved. The wise know that.”
― Katherine Arden, The Winter of the Witch

“We who live forever can know no courage, nor do we love enough to give our lives.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“Love is for those who know the griefs of time, for it goes hand in hand with loss. An eternity, so burdened, would be a torment. And yet—” He broke off, drew breath. “Yet what else to call it, this terror and this joy?”
― Katherine Arden, The Winter of the Witch