GlenK > GlenK's Quotes

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

“Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.”
― John Burroughs, Studies in Nature and Literature

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
― James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion

“I'm not young enough to know everything.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Admirable Crichton

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”
― Robert Fulghum, True Love

“One is happy once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.”
― George Sand, Correspondance, 1812-1876; Volume 5

“Living is a horizontal fall.”
― Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure

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

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
― Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature

“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”
― William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts

“Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.”
― Peter De Vries

“The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.”
― Robert Benchley, My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew

“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”
― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard

“Tis the night—the night
Of the grave's delight,
And the warlocks are at their play;
Ye think that without,
The wild winds shout,
But no, it is they—it is they!”
― Arthur Cleveland Coxe, Halloween: A Romaunt

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
― William Arthur Ward

“It isn't what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“What's the good of living if you don't try a few things?”
― Charles M. Schulz

“Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.”
― Dave Eggers

“Adventure is just bad planning.”
― Roald Amundsen