Keith > Keith's Quotes

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“He who controls the spice controls the universe.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible

“Never own more than you can carry in both hands at a dead run.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwell

“Read, read, read. That's all I can say.”
― Carolyn Keene, The Secret of the Old Clock

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert

“The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish.”
― Terry Southern

“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.”
― Zig Ziglar

“When you read a book, you hold another's mind in your hands.”
― James Burke

“It is my belief that books are living things.... And as living things, they need to be protected.”
― Holly Black

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.”
― Ira Glass

“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

“One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.”
― Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh and Other Stories

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
― Anita Desai

“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
― George R. R. Martin

“On the news tonight the new President said there's no reason for anyone to worry about the situation. He didn't say which situation.”
― Jack Womack, Random Acts of Senseless Violence

“we were all experts at making a great deal out of very little, even while we all still had a lot, and were still being incited by advertisements to spend and use and discard”
― Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor

“yes of course this is not new, has been going on throughout history... Could there be any real difference when this 'ruling class' used words like justice, fair play, equity, order, or ven socialism? -used them, might even have believed in them, or believed in them for a time; but meanwhile everything fell to pieces while still, as always, the administrators lived cushioned against the worst, trying to talk away, wish away, legislate away, the worst- for to admit that it was happening was to admit to themselves useless, admit the extra security they enjoyed was theft and not payment for services rendered...”
― Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor

“My shorter definition of SF (is) Hubris clobbered by nemesis.”
― Brian W. Aldiss