Taylor > Taylor's Quotes

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“The simple fact is that we live in a world of conflict and opposites because we live in a world of boundaries. Since every boundary line is also a battle line, here is the human predicament: the firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched are one’s battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain. The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil. The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure. The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes. The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with its loss. Most of our problems, in other words, are problems of boundaries
and the opposites they create.”
― Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth

“Belief isn't simply a thing for fair times and bright days...What is belief - what is faith - if you don't continue in it after failure?...Anyone can believe in someone, or something that always succeeds...But failure...ah, now, that is hard to believe in, certainly and truly. Difficult enough to have value. Sometimes we just have to wait long enough...then we find out why exactly it was that we kept believing...There's always another secret.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire

“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
― Anne Lamott

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.”
― Lauren DeStefano, Wither

“To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
― Roald Dahl

“Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.”
― Roald Dahl

“You should never, never doubt something that no one is sure of.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“If you are good life is good.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you'll be free if you truly wish to be.”
― Roald Dahl

“All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”
― Joan Powers, Pooh's Little Instruction Book

“Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“Sometimes I see me dead in the rain.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of the writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky