Judey > Judey's Quotes

“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth

“When someone you love dies, you get a big bowl of sadness put down in front of you, steaming hot. You can start eating now, or you can let it cool and eat it bit by bit later one. Either way, you end up eating the whole thing. There's really no way around it.”
― Ralph Fletcher, Fig Pudding

“Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

“I don’t ever remember being afraid of “oldness”.

There are things I miss about being younger - chiefly the ability to pull all-nighters and keep working and working well; and being smiled at by girls I didn’t know who thought I was cute; and I wish I had the eyesight I had even five years ago… but that stuff feels pretty trivial.

I’m happier than I’ve been at any time in my life these days. I have a wonderful wife whom I adore, watched three amazing kids grow into two delightful adults and my favourite teenager, an astonishing number of grand life experiences, I’ve made art I’m proud of, I have real, true, glorious friends, and I’ve been able to do real good for things I care about, like freedom of speech, like libraries.

Sometimes I’ll do something like An Evening With Neil and Amanda, or the 8 in 8 project, and completely surprise myself.

I miss friends who have died, but then, I’m glad that time gave them to me, to befriend, even for a while, and that I was alive to know them. I knew Douglas Adams, and I knew Roger Zelazny, and I knew John M Ford, and I knew Diana Wynne Jones… do you know how lucky that makes me?

Ah, I’m rabbiting on, and I sound a bit more Pollyannaish than I’m intending to sound: I know the downside of age and the downside of time, and I am sure that the view from age 51 is not the view from age 71.

I wish the time hadn’t gone so fast, though. And sometimes I wish I’d enjoyed it more on the way, and worried about it less.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.”
― Coco Chanel

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“Before you act, listen.
Before you react, think.
Before you spend, earn.
Before you criticize, wait.
Before you pray, forgive.
Before you quit, try.”
― William Arthur Ward

“A vision without a task is but a dream. A task without a vision is drudgery. A vision and a task are the hope of the world.”
― Inscription on a church wall in Sussex England c. 1730

“But I hope that I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books,
by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue,
such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of tears,
or just since the most recent Harry Potter.
I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth
and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them,
hope that I spend my last days on this Earth
arranging and rearranging them
on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany,
because they just feel good in my hands,
because I just like to look at their covers,
and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.”
― Rick Bragg

“You can fold fitted sheets?" From the kitchen, Ren replied, "Yeah." I scowled. "Are you even human? No mere mortal can fold a fitted sheet.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, Wicked

“You cannot put straight in others what is warped in yourself.”
― Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation

“From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn