Stephanie Ward > Stephanie's Quotes

“Morning, I soon discovered, was one o’clock for Auntie Mame. Early Morning was eleven, and the Middle of the Night was nine.”
― Patrick Dennis

“You must go on adventures to find out where you belong.”
― Sue Fitzmaurice

“Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly”
― Mary Howitt, The Spider and the Fly

“If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.”
― Mo Willems, Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs

“The noblest art is that of making others happy”
― P.T. Barnum

“the answer to every problem involved penguins”
― Rick Riordan, The Throne of Fire

“In the end, we'll all become stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories

“I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile

“A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“We create our work for children not because they're "cute," but because they're human beings, deserving of respect.”
― Mo Willems

“What strange creatures brothers are!”
― Jane Austen

“Siblings: children of the same parents, each of whom is perfectly normal until they get together.”
― Sam Levenson

“I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement

“Your sibling, after all, is the only other person in the world who understands how fucked up your parents made you.”
― Deb Caletti, The Nature of Jade

“I've been the oldest child since before you were born”
― E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

“An impossibility is just a possibility you don’t understand yet”
― Matt Haig, A Boy Called Christmas

“Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light.”
― Pythagoras

“Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea. They talk about their “morning ritual” and how they “dress for writing” and the cabin in Big Sur where they go to “be alone”—blah blah blah. No one tells the truth about writing a book. Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about writing. I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver. I wrote this book after my kids went to sleep. I wrote this book on subways and on airplanes and in between setups while I shot a television show. I wrote this book from scribbled thoughts I kept in the Notes app on my iPhone and conversations I had with myself in my own head before I went to sleep. I wrote it ugly and in pieces.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“I recently hurt myself on a treadmill and it wasn’t even on. I was adjusting my speed and stepped wrong and twisted my ankle. I felt a moment of frustration filled with immediate relief. I didn’t have to actually work out, but I still got credit for trying. It was a gym snow day.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“Annie taught me that orphanages were a blast and being rich is the only thing that matters. Grease taught me being in a gang is nonstop fun and you need to dress sexier to have any chance of keeping a guy interested.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“nice manners are the secret keys to the universe.”
― Amy Poehler, Yes Please

“Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.”
― Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

“The company of their own sex, Edith reflected, was what drove many women into marriage.”
― Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

“Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off and they are nearly always doing it.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.”
― Kenneth Grahame (Wind in the Willows), The Wind in the Willows

“He saw clearly how plain and simple - how narrow, even - it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid