Hashim > Hashim's Quotes

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt--I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted--and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
― Louis L'Amour

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

“Tears are words that need to be written.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.”
― Philip José Farmer

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

“Written words can also sing.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Dreams in a Time of War

“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”
― Tennessee Williams

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
― George Orwell

“I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
― Nikki Giovanni

“Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“But on paper, things can live forever.
On paper, a butterfly
never dies.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming

“I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“and sometimes I sit
down at my typewriter
and I think
not of someone
cause there isn't anyone
to think
about and i wonder
is it worth it”
― Nikki Giovanni

“We are all pencils in the hand of God.”
― Mother Teresa

“Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design. ”
― Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

“All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.”
― Jimi Hendrix

“I could not think without writing.”
― Jean Piaget

“I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded