Laurel > Laurel's Quotes

“This, you see, is the danger of children: they are ambushes, each and every one of them. A person may look at someone else's child and see only the surface, the shiny shoes or the perfect curls. They do not see the tears and the tantrums, the late nights, the sleepless hours, the worry. They do not even really see the love, not really. It can be easy, when looking at children from the outside, the believe that they are things, dolls designed and programmed by their parents to behave in one manner, following one set of rules. It can be easy, when standing on the lofty shores of adulthood, not to remember that every adult was once a child, with ideas and ambitions of their own.

It can be easy, in the end, to forget that children are people, and that people will do what people will do, the consequences be damned.”
― Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones

“Waiting until everything looks feasible is too long to wait.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“What good does it do to be valuable, if nobody values you?”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“I thought you said everything in a book has meaning.” “It does! That doesn’t mean it means what you want it to mean!”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.”
― Nikita Gill

“She's from a children's book," Charley pointed out. "That makes her by definition more capable than most adults.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“The absurdity of working so hard to continue doing something you don’t like can be overwhelming.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket.
But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“The question is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“People are like cities: We all have alleys and gardens and secret rooftops and places where daisies sprout between the sidewalk cracks, but most of the time all we let each other see is is a postcard glimpse of a skyline or a polished square. Love lets you find those hidden places in another person, even the ones they didn't know were there, even the ones they wouldn't have thought to call beautiful themselves.”
― Hilary T. Smith, Wild Awake

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Our passion wanes, because it's difficult to stay excited about the work when we feel that practical limitations will ultimately prevent us from really doing something we believe to be truly great.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I’ve heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures’ myths, and maybe that was true. I don’t know. What I see, when I read his work, is a man trying desperately to dream.

Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don’t have enough myths of our own, we’ll latch onto those of others — even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it’s human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight.”
― N.K. Jemisin

“—The problem with a book is that you never know what it’s planning to do to you until you’re too far into it.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Every supporting character is the protagonist of his own story.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“Who you are isn't the thoughts in your head or the fears in your heart or the name someone else gives you or takes from you. Who you are is what you do. It's the actions you take, or that you don't take. It's the way that you help people, or don't. It's the good that you put into the world, or the bad.”
― Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths

“Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that... there are many kinds of magic, after all.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”
― Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“Writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or a way to develop them. A well-practiced, conclusive narrative is usually a dubious one:”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

“Beauty is a call to admiration, not to action.”
― Ingrid Sischy, Nothing Is Lost: Selected Essays

“Hold fast to dreams
for if dreams die
life is a broken-winged bird
that can not fly.

Hold fast to dreams
for when dreams go
life is a barren field
frozen with snow.”
― Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems

“War doesn't determine who's right. War determines who remains.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Even if we didn't know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they'd tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming