Autumn > Autumn's Quotes

“The flip side of freedom is this: When you're completely free, you're also completely on your own.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“I read once about a kind of fungus that grows in trees. The fungus begins to encroach on the systems that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the branches. It disables them one by one―it crowds them out. Soon, the fungus―and only the fungus―is carrying the water, and the chemicals, and everything else the tree needs to survive. At the same time it is decaying the tree slowly from within, turning it minute by minute to rot.
That is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.
It is hard and deep and angular, a system of blockades. It is everything and total.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.”
― Margaret Walker

“I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money - I think that can be a burden - I’m greedy for an exciting life.”
― David Hockney

“Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.”
― Donald E. Westlake, Two Much

“I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.”
― Jack London

“There's something ugly about the flawless.”
― Dennis Lehane, Sacred

“I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life”
― Diane di Prima

“Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?”
― Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan

“The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke

“Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.”
― Maria Montessori

“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them. ”
― Boris Pasternak

“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.”
― Sherwood Anderson

“One day might be different from another, but there ain't much difference when they're put together.”
― William H. Armstrong

“Each person has a literature inside them.”
― Anna Deavere Smith

“Love can make even nice people do awful things.”
― Jude Deveraux

“Poetry is the fiery index to the genius of the age.”
― Babette Deutsch

“It isn't ever delicate to live.”
― Kay Ryan

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.”
― Confucius

“They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.”
― Caroline Gordon