Megan > Megan's Quotes

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Some things have to be believed to be seen.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
― T.S. Eliot

“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”
― T.S. Eliot

“It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. we must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift amont each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep - just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“My mother said I broke her heart...but it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it's all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us...but within that inch we are free.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Happy endings are still endings.”
― Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

“I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed.”
― Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby

“In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realize it is far more common for men to turn into rats.”
― Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister