Verena Murphy > Verena's Quotes

“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”
― John Muir

“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.”
― Rene Daumal

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“People like you must create. If you don't create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.”
― Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”
― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.”
― David Quammen, The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder

“Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

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

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”
― Herman Wouk