Heather > Heather's Quotes

“It's come at last", she thought, "the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“The duty of the moment is what you should be doing at any given time, in whatever place God has put you.

You may not have Christ in a homeless person at your door, but you may have a little child.

If you have a child, your duty of the moment may be to change a dirty diaper.

So you do it.

But you don't just change that diaper, you change it to the best of your ability, with great love for both God and that child....

There are all kinds of good Catholic things you can do, but whatever they are, you have to realize that there is always the duty of the moment to be done.

And it must be done, because the duty of the moment is the duty of God.”
― Catherine Doherty

“How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe?
How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No. A woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without.”
― Jodi Picoult, Perfect Match

“The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.”
― Dorothy Parker

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
― Anthony Trollope

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
― Stephen King

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

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“I hate writing, I love having written.”
― Dorothy Parker

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”
― E.B. White

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.”
― Alice Walker

“Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.”
― Jennifer Weiner

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.”
― Stephen King

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”
― Paul Valery