Tarl > Tarl's Quotes

“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
― Franz Kafka

“Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.”
― Louis Adamic

“All happiness depends on courage and work.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Books may well be the only true magic.”
― Alice Hoffman

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft

“The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

“Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”
― Howard Phillips Lovecraft

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.”
― John Boyne

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”
― Maurice Sendak

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."

("The Castle")”
― Michael Connelly

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King

“Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.”
― Lauren DeStefano, Wither

“What a pity every child couldn't learn to read under a willow tree...”
― Elizabeth George Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond

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

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“You don't need millions of dollars or millions of people if you're doing what you love.”
― Felicia Day

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“After a dozen deaths, you learn not to care. After a hundred, you can’t even if you wanted to.”
― C.L. Werner, Dead Winter

“Because it is on the anvil of pain that the gods forge heroes.”
― C.L. Werner, Blighted Empire (1)