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Favourite quotes

Kelise

Maester
I thought it might be nice to have a thread where we post our favourite quotes about writing (and reading)?

I'll start it off, but I warn you - the one I found is long, but I like it so much I just have to share it around :)


"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You'll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She's the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That's the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She's the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she's kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author's making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce's Ulysses she's just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It's easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she's going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She'll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she's sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn't burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you're better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl ho writes.” – Rosemary Urquico
 
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I have two quotes that I like....sometimes I can recite them from memory; other times I have to email and it and say here.

The first is one my favorite on love and what it means to be in love.

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.” ~Neil Gaiman~

The second one is that everyone has obstacles to overcome. It's what happens after you fall that makes you who you are.

"Every Warrior of the Light has felt afraid of going into battle. Every Warrior of the Light has, at some time in the past, lied or betrayed someone. Every Warrior of the Light has trodden a path that was not his. Every Warrior of the Light has suffered for the most trivial of reasons. Every Warrior of the Light has, at least once, believed he was not a Warrior of the Light. Every Warrior of the Light has failed in his spiritual duties. Every Warrior of the Light has said 'yes' when he wanted to say 'no.' Every Warrior of the Light has hurt someone he loved. That is why he is a Warrior of the Light, because he has been through all this and yet has never lost hope of being better than he is." ~ Paulo Coelho 21st century Brazilian writer from Warrior of the Light~
 
From one of my faves, Terry Pratchett:


"I'm about 10,000 words into my next book. Do I know what it is about? Yes, I do know what it is about, it's just that I'm not telling myself. I can see bits of the story and I know the story is there. This is what I call draft zero. This is private. No one ever, ever gets to see draft zero. This is the draft that you write to tell yourself what the story is.

Someone asked me recently how to guard against writing on auto-pilot. I responded that writing on auto-pilot is very, very important! I sit there and I bash the stuff out. I don't edit - I let it flow. The important thing is that the next day I sit down and edit like crazy. But for the first month or so of writing a book I try to get the creative side of the mind to get it down there on the page.

Later on I get the analytical side to come along and chop the work into decent lengths, edit it and knock it into the right kind of shape. Everyone finds their own way of doing things. I certainly don't sit down and plan a book out before I write it.

There's a phrase I use called "The Valley Full of Clouds." Writing a novel is as if you are going off on a journey across a valley. The valley is full of mist, but you can see the top of a tree here and the top of another tree over there. And with any luck you can see the other side of the valley. But you cannot see down into the mist. Nevertheless, you head for the first tree.

At this stage in the book, I know a little about how I want to start. I know some of the things that I want to do on the way. I think I know how I want it to end. This is enough. The thing now is to get as much down as possible. If necessary, I will write the ending fairly early on in the process. Now that ending may not turn out to be the real ending by the time that I have finished. But I will write down now what I think the conclusion of the book is going to be.

It's all a technique, not to get over writer's block, but to get 15,000 or 20,000 words of text under my belt. When you've got that text down, then you can work on it. Then you start giving yourself ideas."
 
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My favorite quote comes from a book does that count? >.< My all time favorite quote is the very first line in Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged.. The simplicity and complexity of "Who is John Galt?" of course before you read the book you have no idea why this question is posed, by the end you understand and you laugh... It's my favorite quote now LOL
 

Ophiucha

Auror
I certainly have a fair few, I'm afraid.

"Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings."​
- Salvador Dali​
"It's that iconic imagery of that sea of raised fists during a live performance. It's a symbol of unity and strength and at the same time there are elements of defiance and rebellion that are inherent in that raised fist symbol. It's just one of those iconic pieces of imagery from the life of rock 'n' roll."​
- David Draiman​
"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."​
- Ernest Hemingway​
"He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths."​
- II Kings 2:24 (NIV)​
"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."​
- C.S. Lewis​
"I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess."​
- H.P. Lovecraft​
"Total nonretention has kept my education from being a burden to me."​
- Flannery O'Connor​
"It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first."​
- Ronald Reagan​
"It is only by enlarging the scope of one's tastes and one's fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that that unfortunate individual called man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life's thorns."​
- Marquis de Sade​
"It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand."​
- Mark Twain​
"I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses."​
- William Makepeace Thackery​
 
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I love these quotes! I relate to the one by Terry Pratchett, who needs 10-20k to get into the current story. I tell myself this over and over as I muddle and hem and haw over the beginning when I really need to just plow through until the story begins to write itself. I also think of the first go as a 'zero draft', my eyes only.

My quote:

'You'll never plough a field by turning it over in your mind.' Irish proverb.

I found that one just the other day. Love it!
 

Telcontar

Staff
Moderator
For some reason, this one always makes me laugh:

I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard

I'm a huge fan of quotes, but oddly enough I don't know/remember many about writing.
 

myrddin173

Maester
My favorite funny quote is "My mother is a fish" - William Faulkner As I Lay Dying

My favorite meaningful quote is my sig.
 

Kate

Troubadour
I thought it might be nice to have a thread where we post our favourite quotes about writing (and reading)?

I'll start it off, but I warn you - the one I found is long, but I like it so much I just have to share it around :)


"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. [...]

I love this. The first time I saw it was, I believe when you posted it on Goodreads. I printed it off and showed it to my fiance in the hope that, I dunno, maybe he'd make me a cup of tea the next time he found me blubbering at something I was reading, or get the hint that all I want for my birthday/Christmas/any day of the year is books. He looked it up and down and said "It's too long - do I have to read the whole thing?" O_O

*sigh* I'd like to believe he would know at least who Alice was..... (and I'd answer, if ever asked, both)
 
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Behelit

Troubadour
Its not writing related but its by an author and its very general in scope.

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed."
— Mark Twain
 

Digital_Fey

Troubadour
Starconstant, that quote is music to my bookworm-y ears :p

Unfortunately I have a terrible habit of forgetting quotes as soon as I've finished the book they're in >.> This one always makes me smile though:

"Sometimes, it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness." - Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
 

Oof Nian

Dreamer
from robert ludlum novel :
cia agen quote : you know something harry all lesson you get , all the word you hear, all experience you go through , never take the place of first rule , teach your self to think like te enemy think :)
 
Starconstant, that quote was great. Very passionate.
As for some that I find interesting:
“I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” - Oscar Wilde

“I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.” - Oscar Wilder

"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer." - Barbara Kingsolver

"Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words – the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered." - J. Michael Straczynski
 

Cinnea

Dreamer
I'll contribute with three - all of them from Albert Einstein:

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
 

Neunzehn

Scribe
"On a scale of one to ten, it's, not, good." -Owl (from Winnie the Pooh)

"I salute you! And those of you doomed to never return, I salute you twice!" -Owl

and, anything from the Bible.
 

Helbrecht

Minstrel
. . . That quote was brilliant, starconstant, utterly brilliant. The woman who said it is now a genius in my books. Wish there was more I could say about it. Wowza.

Liking the variety here so far. Lots of the classics seem to be cropping up, but there's a couple more obscure ones I've seen which are quite intriguing as well. Keep it up, guys. ^_^

Here's a few of mine. I have plenty which are more political that I've kept out of this list to avoid any potential disagreements.

"Humour is an almost physiological response to fear." Kurt Vonnegut

"We are here on Earth to fart around and don't let anyone tell you different." Kurt Vonnegut

"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative." Oscar Wilde

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh; otherwise, they'll kill you." Oscar Wilde

"The world always seems a nicer place when you've just made something that wasn't there before." Neil Gaiman

"You can appreciate that a garden is beautiful without believing there are fairies at the bottom of it." Douglas Adams

And from some various delightful works of fiction:

"I am a fully rounded human being, with a degree from the university of life, a diploma from the school of hard knocks, and three gold stars from the kindergarten of getting the s*** kicked out of me". Captain Edmund Blackadder, Blackadder Goes Forth

"Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose." Rorschach, Watchmen by Alan Moore

"Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part." Det. William Somerset, Se7en

'"Hey," Shadow said, "Hugin or Munin, whoever you are. Say 'Nevermore'."
"F*** you," said the raven.' - American Gods, Neil Gaiman

"Doctor . . . I'm taking your sister into my protection here. And I swear to you, if anything happens to her, anything at all . . . I will get very choked up. Honestly. There could be tears." Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity

"You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!" President Merkin Muffley, Dr. Strangelove (can't beat it!)
 
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