Pam Talbott > Pam's Quotes

“Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”
― Joseph Campbell

“The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

“All that glisters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”
― Christopher Morley, Pipefuls

“It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.”
― William Ralph Inge

“A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.”
― Washington Irving

“There is no place like home.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“To err is human, to forgive, divine.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.”
― Isadora Duncan, Isadora Speaks: Uncollected Writings and Speeches of Isadora Duncan

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before.”
― Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”
― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard

“Tis the night—the night
Of the grave's delight,
And the warlocks are at their play;
Ye think that without,
The wild winds shout,
But no, it is they—it is they!”
― Arthur Cleveland Coxe, Halloween: A Romaunt

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.”
― John Boyne

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

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

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“Sunny day
Sweepin' the clouds away
On my way to where the air is sweet”
― Joe Raposo

“Where words leave off, music begins.”
― Heinrich Heine

“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”
― Stewart O'Nan, The Odds: A Love Story

“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
― Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening