Jaci McCon > Jaci's Quotes

“You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“My mother is a fish.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

To shrug.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1) separate

“And I still surfed on Manhattan static.”
― Martin Amis

“As for me, I'm a gurgling wizard of calorific excess.”
― Martin Amis

“Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.”
― Andrew Lang, Adventures Among Books

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Faith in faith' he answered himself. 'It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief.”
― Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King

“Whether you know it or not, we leave parts of ourselves wherever we go.”
― Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“When people are mad, do they become different people, or are they versions of themselves with all the horrible things about them magnified?”
― Mari Strachan, The Earth Hums in B Flat

“Perfection is being happy with what you are right now.”
― Michael Poore, Reincarnation Blues

“Words can carry any burden we wish. All that’s required is agreement and a tradition upon which to build.”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

“You are never too old to learn more than you already know and to become able to do more than you already can.”
― Isaac Asimov