2026 Reading Challenge

AJ > AJ's Quotes

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  • #1
    William Faulkner
    “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
    7214 likes

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  • #2
    E.L. Doctorow
    “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
    ― E.L. Doctorow
    tags: writing
    4685 likes

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  • #3
    Robert Frost
    “In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
    ― Robert Frost
    tags: life
    109281 likes

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  • #4
    Mae West
    “There are no good girls gone wrong - just bad girls found out.”
    ― Mae West
    tags: women
    8244 likes

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  • #5
    H. Jackson Brown Jr.
    “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
    ― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You
    tags: actions, disappointed, disappointment, dream, dreams, explore, misattributed-mark-twain, sail
    60255 likes

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  • #6
    Oscar Wilde
    “I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
    ― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories
    tags: intelligence, self-deprecation
    71688 likes

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  • #7
    Oscar Wilde
    “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
    ― Oscar Wilde
    tags: attributed-no-source, enemies, forgiveness, strategy
    81811 likes

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  • #8
    Leonardo da Vinci
    “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
    ― Leonardo da Vinci
    tags: flight, flying, inspirational
    4362 likes

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  • #9
    Coco Chanel
    “The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”
    ― Coco Chanel
    tags: courage, dignity, empowerment, freedom, independence, individuality, judgment, self-determination, speaking-out, thought
    7228 likes

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  • #10
    Richard Hughes
    “Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.”
    ― Richard Hughes
    1964 likes

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  • #11
    Charlotte Brontë
    “Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.”
    ― Charlotte Bronte
    2184 likes

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  • #12
    Friedrich Nietzsche
    “Without music, life would be a mistake.”
    ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
    tags: inspirational, music, philosophy
    74335 likes

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  • #13
    Sylvia Plath
    “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
    tags: writing
    7945 likes

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  • #14
    “I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”
    ― Joss Whedon
    tags: writing
    2646 likes

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  • #15
    Quentin R. Bufogle
    “Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn't return my phone calls; the itch I'm unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn't something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It's just something I do because not writing, as I've found, is so much worse.”
    ― Quentin R. Bufogle
    tags: writer-s-pain, writer-s-philosophy, writer-s-voice, writers-on-writing, writers-quotes, writers-world, writing, writing-process
    80 likes

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  • #16
    Stephen King
    “I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.”
    ― Stephen King
    tags: reading, writing
    130 likes

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  • #17
    Bernard Malamud
    “There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go--if there are no doors or windows--he walks through a wall.”
    ― Bernard Malamud
    1438 likes

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  • #18
    Chuck Palahniuk
    “It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
    ― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary
    tags: happiness, pain, peace, scar, sweetness
    15762 likes

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  • #19
    Walt Whitman
    “Resist much, obey little.”
    ― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
    tags: poetry
    6199 likes

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  • #20
    Thomas Mann
    “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
    ― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales
    tags: absurd, beauty, perverse, solitude
    1764 likes

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  • #21
    Philip Barry
    “The time to make up your mind about people, is never.”
    ― Philip Barry, The Philadelphia Story: A Comedy in Three Acts
    tags: the-philadelphia-story, tracy-lord
    983 likes

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  • #22
    Octavia E. Butler
    “In order to rise
    From its own ashes
    A phoenix
    First
    Must
    Burn.”
    ― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents
    3102 likes

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  • #23
    Jean de la Fontaine
    “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”
    ― Jean de La Fontaine, Fables
    2691 likes

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  • #24
    Marcel Proust
    “Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
    ― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
    2241 likes

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  • #25
    Hunter S. Thompson
    “A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
    ― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
    3248 likes

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  • #26
    George Bernard Shaw
    “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
    ― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
    tags: life, philosophy, philosophy-of-life, progress
    4032 likes

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  • #27
    Søren Kierkegaard
    “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
    ― Søren Kierkegaard
    tags: civil-rights, free-speech, free-will, freedom, intelligence, liberty, stupidity
    4203 likes

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  • #28
    James Baldwin
    “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
    ― James Baldwin
    3910 likes

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  • #29
    W. Somerset Maugham
    “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
    ― W. Somerset Maugham
    tags: writing
    3853 likes

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  • #30
    Jean de La Bruyère
    “Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.”
    ― Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères
    tags: time
    1578 likes



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writing
life
women
actions
disappointed
disappointment
dream
dreams
explore
misattributed-mark-twain
sail
intelligence
self-deprecation
attributed-no-source
enemies
forgiveness
strategy
flight
flying
inspirational
courage
dignity
empowerment
freedom
independence
individuality
judgment
self-determination
speaking-out
thought
music
philosophy
writer-s-pain
writer-s-philosophy
writer-s-voice
writers-on-writing
writers-quotes
writers-world
writing-process
reading
happiness
pain
peace
scar
sweetness
poetry
absurd
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perverse
solitude
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tracy-lord
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