Amy > Amy's Quotes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“I would assign every lie a color: yellow when they were innocent, pale blue when they sailed over you like the sky, red because I knew they drew blood. And then there was the black lie. That's the worst of all. A black lie was when I told you the truth. ”
― Steve Martin

“Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Name the different kinds of people,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’

Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said. ‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘... Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“I don't suffer from insanity. I can actually say that I enjoy it.”
― Tim Dorsey

“Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?”
― Neil Gaiman

“Roosevelt spoke eloquently, in his penetrating tenor, of those 'who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,' he told the audience, '. . . The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
― Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the Wpa and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times

“Marriage, in my view, should be a balanced stalemate between equal adversaries.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Mummy Case

“God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Funny thing about those Middle Ages, said Joseph. "They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they're in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there's an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can't deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don't you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.”
― Kage Baker

“Perhaps that's how I should think of them, Polly thought, the troupe and Miss Snelgrove and Trot. And Sir Godfrey. Not as lost to her, but as removed to this moment in time for safekeeping.”
― Connie Willis, All Clear

“That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.”
― Connie Willis, Remake

“And as the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so was my beloved among the sons. Et cetera. What would I give, to have that night back, out of all my nights? No treasure fleet could hold it, what I'd give; no caravan of mules could carry it away.”
― Kage Baker, In the Garden of Iden

“August in Florida is God's way of reminding us who's in charge.”
― Blaize Clement, Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs

“It wasn't all that different from any particularly demanding boarding school, except that of course nobody ever went home for the holidays and we had a lot of brain surgery.”
― Kage Baker, In the Garden of Iden

“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Prose Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.”
― Herman Wouk

“Yes, give us books about the psychotic behavior and peripheral weirdness we see all around every day -- and we will laugh in its face.

We are a proud people.

We are Floridians.”
― Tim Dorsey, Squall Lines

“Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”
― Linda Hogan

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

“By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.

Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.

These are worth it. These are what I have come for.”
― Margaret Atwood, Good Bones and Simple Murders

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

“I've heard that sarcasm is no substitute for cleverness”
― Meredith Duran, Wicked Becomes You

“Here's the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you ever stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant parabola of sound. A door slams. The old couple in 4A argues over who will answer the telephone. The young lovers in 2C reach an animalistic climax. A million other lives play out on your doorstep, and not one of them gives a damn about your little problems. Life goes on and on and on.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Secret Life of Violet Grant

“Once a book has left the brain of the author, it took on a life of its own, and served as the only liaison between the reader and the author. If you read carefully, the book could tell you all sorts of secrets-sometimes about its characters, and sometimes about its creator.”
― Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs

“The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.   W”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“It wasn't exactly like I'd sold out on my life and dreams and all that other bullshit, because the truth was I'd never actually had anything to sell. It was more like I slowly froze in place, inside my little office at the museum; more like some part of me just fell asleep one day and never woke up.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon