Beth > Beth's Quotes

“If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
― Mark Twain

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“It had turned out that climbing a tree was more difficult than it looked. It was harder than warrior pose in yoga, than teaser in Pilates, than the elliptical or the Reformer. Rebecca thought that if no one had thought of it yet, soon enough someone in the city would spearhead a craze for tree climbing in Central and Prospect Parks, and it would become the talk of every cocktail party: have you tried that large oak by the Sheep Meadow? Oh, it’s completely changed my body.”
― Anna Quindlen, Still Life with Bread Crumbs

“In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.”
― Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.”
― J.M. Barrie

“Comparison is the death of joy.”
― Mark Twain

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.”
― Stephen Greenblatt

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
― George Eliot

“You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.”
― Olin Miller

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“An adult life...is a slowly emerging design, with shifting components, occasional dramatic disruptions, and fresh creative arrangements.”
― Jill Ker Conway

“Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“My point in setting these two descriptions up in this way is simply this: the nature of creative activity itself – what the brain does, and the social and psychic conditions needed for its nurture – has remained essentially the same between Thomas’s time and our own. Human beings did not suddenly acquire imagination and intuition with Coleridge, having previously been poor clods. The difference is that whereas now geniuses are said to have creative imagination which they express in intricate reasoning and original discovery, in earlier times they were said to have richly retentive memories, which they expressed in intricate reasoning and original discovery.”
― Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
― Truman Capote

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”
― Alexander Trocchi

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties.”
― Gail Sheehy

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
― Hermann Hesse