Len > Len's Quotes

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#1

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

10850 likes

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#2

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

8971 likes

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#3

“The difference between the truth and a lie is that both of them can hurt, but only one will take the time to heal you afterward.”
― Mira Grant, Feed

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#4

“Fear of joy is the darkest of captivities.”
― Phil Kaye

tags: fear, joy, phil-kaye, poetry, second-world-war, teeth

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#5

“You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

tags: intelligence, mind, poverty

4089 likes

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#6

“The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.”
― Ezra Pound

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#7

“It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”
― Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy

tags: healing, pain, remembrance, scars, time

5074 likes

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#8

“I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

tags: mute, suffering, writing

89 likes

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#9

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

7615 likes

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#10

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

tags: writing

3629 likes

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#11

“I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

tags: writers-on-writing

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#12

“If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I’ll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming ‘Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?”
― Stephen King

tags: books, commencement, intellect, stephen-king

143 likes

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#13

“The truth isn’t scary. Not when you understand it, not when you understand the repercussions of it, and not when you aren’t worried that something’s being kept from you. The truth is only scary when you think part of it might be missing. And those people? They like it when you’re scared. So they do their best to sit on the truth, to sensationalize the truth, to filter the truth in ways that make it something you can be afraid of. If we didn’t have to fear the truths we didn’t hear, we’d lose the need to fear the ones we did. People should consider that.”
― Mira Grant, Feed

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#14

“If we judge ourselves only by our aspirations and everyone else only their conduct we shall soon reach a very false conclusion.”
― Calvin Coolidge

tags: criticism, judgmental, motivation

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#16

“If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.”
― Evelyn Underhill

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#16

“Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much.”
― Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

tags: africa, alan-paton, cry-the-beloved-country, south-africa

176 likes

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#17

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”
― Anna Quindlen

tags: books, children

1324 likes

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#18

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

276 likes

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#19

“The greatest danger of being gifted, is that you may never learn how to make an effort.”
― Tibor Fischer

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#20

“Many of us, I suppose, see our existences not as lives, but as life-holders, zarfs, waiting for the job, the person, the event to fill it.”
― Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang

tags: existance, life, the-thought-gang, thought-gang, tibor-fischer

8 likes

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#21

“Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.”
― Joanna Russ

tags: feminism, writing

59 likes

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#22

“Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can not be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.”
― Ezra Pound

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#23

“The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Fanny's First Play

tags: bible, morality

15 likes

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#24

“No man can be really free in bed with a woman who is not.”
― Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies

tags: liberty, nancy-friday, sex, women

27 likes

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#25

“I do think that poetry is important though, if you don’t strive at it, if you don’t fill it full of stars and falseness.”
― Charles Bukowski

tags: charles-bukowski, falseness, poetry, stars, writing

19 likes

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#26

“Euphemisms persist because lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.”
― Bergen Evans

tags: bergen-evans, euphemisms, language-awareness, life, lying

4 likes

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#27

“He was not sure, but liked it. It recurred when they met suddenly or had been silent. It beckoned to him across intellect, saying, "This is all very well, you're clever, we know—but come!" It haunted him so that he watched for it while his brain and tongue were busy, and when it came he felt himself replying, "I'll come—I didn't know."
"You can't help yourself now. You must come."
"I don't want to help myself."
"Come then."
He did come. He flung down all the barriers—not at once, for he did not live in a house that can be destroyed in a day.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

tags: barriers, forster, love, lovers, maurice

12 likes

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#29

“Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.'
That's a rather broad idea,' I remarked.
One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,' he answered.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

tags: darwin, music, nature, sherlock-holmes, watson

318 likes

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#29

“As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

208 likes

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#30

“A writer wastes nothing.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

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fear
joy
phil-kaye
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