Mona > Mona's Quotes

“For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons

“Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“If you are lazy, and accept your lot, you may live in it. If you are willing to work, you can write your name anywhere you choose.”
― Gene Stratton-Porter, A Girl of the Limberlost

“You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.”
― Jean M. Auel

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”
― Sir Francis Bacon

“Don't gobblefunk around with words.”
― Roald Dahl, The BFG

“A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.”
― China Miéville, King Rat

“Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.”
― John Waters, Role Models

“The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.”
― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, A Grammar of the English Tongue, Preface to Shakespeare, Lives of the English Poets & more [improved 11/20/2010]

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad.”
― Aleister Crowley, Magick: Liber ABA: Book 4

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”
― Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“To be content with little is difficult; to be content with much, impossible.”
― Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms

“The unfed mind devours itself.”
― Gore Vidal

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
― Desmond Tutu

“Since every country stands in numerous and various relations with the other countries of the world, and many, our own among the number, exercise actual authority over some of these, a knowledge of the established rules of international morality is essential to the duty of every nation, and therefore of every person in it who helps to make up the nation, and whose voice and feeling form a part of what is called public opinion. Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject. It depends on the habit of attending to and looking into public transactions, and on the degree of information and solid judgment respecting them that exists in the community, whether the conduct of the nation as a nation, both within itself and towards others, shall be selfish, corrupt, and tyrannical, or rational and enlightened, just and noble.”
― John Stewart Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St Andrews, 2/1/1867

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”
― Socrates

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Literary Remains

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”
― Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Selected Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

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