Ellen > Ellen's Quotes

“Good manners and bad breath will get you nowhere.”
― Elvis Costello

“whats so funny bout peace, love and understanding?”
― Nick Lowe

“Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go 15 rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. “The Magic Flute” v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. “The Last Supper” v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception -– “Blonde on Blonde” might mash up The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn’t give much for Pale Fire’s chance against Citizen Kane. And every now and again you'd get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I'm still backing literature 29 times out of 30.”
― Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”
― David Sedaris

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Time doth flit; oh shit.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Let us try what love will do.”
― William Penn

“All the little money that ever came into my hands was ever laid out in books.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“I wrote MARCH FARM because I fell in love with the farms of Bethlehem when I moved here in 2000. I became passionate about preserving farms for many reasons: to secure the open spaces vital for wildlife habitat, to support my community by maintaining its rural beauty, and to honor a way of life that has deep roots in our cultural psyche.”
― Nancy McMillan