Marie Macpherson > Marie's Quotes

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Stories to read are delitabill (delightful)
Suppose that they be nocht but fable (fiction)
Then should stories that suthfast were (truthful)
- And they were said in good manner -
Have double pleasure in hearing.
The first pleasance is the carping (reading aloud)
And the tothir the suthfastness
That shows the thing richt as it was;”
― John Barbour

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy

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

“Free will: I chose to do it.
Predestination: I had no choice.”
― Marie Macpherson

“Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.”
― Jean Cocteau

“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Anyone in pursuit of art is responding to a desire to make visible that which is not, to offer the unknown self to others.”
― Hettie Jones

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“We never know the quality of someone else's life, though we seldom resist the temptation to assume and pass judgement.”
― Tami Hoag, Dark Horse

“There's nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“That marks on paper could be transformed into words seemed a kind of magical process, a kind of alchemy – not least because most of my earliest reading material was fairy stories and legends.”
― Marie Macpherson

“I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.”
― Matt Groening

“What a blessing it is to love books.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer

“Laugh loudly, laugh often, and most important, laugh at yourself.”
― Chelsea Handler, Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me

“The great object of life is Sensation - to feel that we exist - even though in pain - it is this "craving void" which drives us to gaming - to battle - to travel - to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”
― Byron

“What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.”
― Ted Hughes

“In books and in life, you need to read several pages before someone's true character is revealed.”
― Gail Carson Levine

“Sometimes we spend so much time and energy thinking about where we want to go that we don't notice where we happen to be.”
― Dan Gutman, From Texas with Love

“Be an encourager. Scatter sunshine. Who knows whose life you might touch with something as simple as a kind word.”
― Debbie Macomber

“Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes.”
― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Having an economy of spirit is a poor gift to share with those who toil in your name.

Cant remember who said this!”
― Marie Macpherson

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“The first piece of advice I would give any writer is to read a lot and to read widely. Firstly you start to realize what’s out there and what isn’t out there. Publishers are looking for stories that haven’t been told before. Reading other people can also improve your own writing. I love reading poetry even though I wouldn’t think of writing it. A great poet can say in two lines what it takes me a whole novel to express. If I’ve learned from any kind of writing, it’s poetry – and the lesson is concision. What can you leave out and the reader will still get the message?”
― ian Rankin

“I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights