Quotes That Pack a Wallop
Being a girl is so powerful that we have had to train everyone to not be that.
-Eve Ensler, Vagina Monologues
Send me your favorite quotes and I'll add them to the list.
•"I think writers lead double lives. We are people who have to, in a sense, indoctrinate ourselves into living by recording as well and somebody asked me once what I felt about writing, and I said--and I still believe--I have to write as if my life depends on it, and of course, it does."
• Author Judy Blume says on finishing a piece of writing: "Part ing with my characters is like saying that final goodbye to an old friend. Oh sure, they're still there for me if I want to pick up a book and thumb through the pages, but they're no longer part of my everyday life. Each time I have to learn to let go all over again, to send them out into the world without my protection."
-Judy Blume
• When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
—George Orwell
• Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them,
and try to follow where they lead.
-Louisa May Alcott
• How people treat you is their karma. How you react is yours.
-Wayne Dyer
• I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable and beautiful
and afraid of nothing as though
I had wings.
-Mary Oliver
• The special significance of a true work of art resides in the fact that it has escaped from the limitations of the personal and has soared beyond the personal concerns of its creator.
-Carl Jung
• Don't confuse honors with achievements.
-Zadie Smith
• There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.
- Walter 'Red' Smith (sports columnist)
• Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
-G. K. Chesterton
• Be orderly in your life, and ordinary like a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your works.
-Gustave Flaubert
• We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
-Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
• A masterpiece isn’t better rubbish.
-André Malraux
• Suicide note: I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices.
-Virginia Woolf
• The goal of good fiction is to make us feel less alone.
-David Foster Wallace
• We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
-Anaïs Nin
•“It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.”
― Raymond Carver
• “Children, everybody, here's what to do during war: In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston
• Things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out. Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
-E.B. White
• We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
-Ursula Le Guin
• I tell my students that content and form are like a bicycle. Content is one wheel and form the other, and the two need to be equally strong and moving at the same velocity to carry the poem to where it needs to go.
-Layli Long Soldier as quoted by artforum.
• are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
-Kurt Vonnegut
• We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
-Anaïs Nin
• A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can't defuse a bomb. But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars.”
~Salman Rushdie
• Do not hurry; do not rest
.- Goethe
• Some people never go crazy,What truly horrible lives they must live.
-Charles Bukowski
• Go back and look at every word and ask yourself if it's true.
-Grace Paley
• One man gathers what another man spills.
-Ken Kesey in a letter to friends about donating his son's organs
• In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
-Albert Camus
• My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go
.-Oscar Wilde
• There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
-Maya Angelou
• The first draft of anything is shit.
-Ernest Hemingway `
• Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
-Charles Bukowski
• I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.
-Joss Whedon.
• It is almost as if the world gets calm as you keep calm yourself, and vice versa.
-Alan Watts
• A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building—it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.”
-John Irving
• Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
-Andre Gide