R.J. > R.J.'s Quotes

“Every man's life is a fairy tale, written by God's fingers.”
― Hans Christian Andersen

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“If I am the pawn of the gods, it is because they know me so well, not because they make my mind up for me.”
― Megan Whalen Turner, The Queen of Attolia

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis

“When the time comes to leap in faith whether you have your eyes open or closed or scream all the way down or not makes no practical difference.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warrior's Apprentice

“Then come out," said the king, helping him, "knowing you'll never die of a fall unless the god himself drops you.”
― Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia

“If you'd take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can't say. But it might.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.”
― Connie Willis, The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

“Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.”
― Patricia Hampl

“To have output you must have input. It helps to go on a period of creative nourishment, or dolce far niente, clearing the brain. Go to bed with the cat, some flouffy pillows, tea and a book which could not in any sense be called improving. Read for fun for a change: superior Chicklit is good, or children’s classics. You are not allowed to try and analyse what the author is doing. After a good sleep, go and do something new, or that you haven’t done for a while....”
― Lucy Sussex

“For me, creative energy is like an old-fashioned ground-water well. When the well is dry, it’s dry. I can dig all I like, and all I’ll get for my pains is sore hands, some very bad prose, and maybe (if I’m lucky) a few odd droplets of notes I can actually use. Or not. It’s usually not worth it. After many years, I’ve discovered that it’s better to wait until some ground water seeps back into the well rather than to try and lick up every drop as it emerges.”
― Delia Sherman

“I think ‘slow writing’ is the answer when the feeling of burn out threatens, something akin to the ‘slow food’ movement. Anxiety and panic are counterproductive to the creative process.”
― Rosaleen Love

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”
― kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory

“Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?”
― Laura Miller, The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

“What do we find God 'doing about' this business of sin and evil?...God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays

“Love? Do I love? I walk
Within the brilliance of another's thought,
As in a glory. I was dark before,
as Venus' chapel in the black of night:
But there was something holy in the darkness,
Softer and not so thick as the other where;
And as rich moonlight may be to the blind,
Unconsciously consoling. Then love came,
Like the out-bursting of a trodden star.”
― Thomas Lovell Beddoes

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I strongly object to wrong arguments on the right side. I think I object to them more than to the wrong arguments on the wrong side.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 32: The Illustrated London News, 1920-1922

“There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
― G.K. Chesterton