Berta > Berta's Quotes

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.”
― Paul Auster

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“We write to make sense of it all.”
― Wallace Stegner

“...you must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books.”
― Wallace Stegner

“Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“A library is infinity under a roof.”
― Gail Carson Levine