Always Knowing Quotes (page 44)
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I remember one morning...
getting up at dawn...
there was such a sense of possibility!
You know? That feeling?
And... and I remember thinking to myself:
'So this is the beginning of happiness...'
'This is where it starts!'
'And, of course, there'll always be more.'
Never occurred to me
it wasn't the beginning,
It was happiness.
It was the moment...
Virginia Woolf
To see an almost certain horrible death--you know how crowds all sit at the edge of their seats, /praying/ subconsciously for a spectacular accident--and then to be whisked away from it so suddenly--brought to the edge of tragedy, and then to have their better natures win out, showing them how much nicer they always /knew/ they were--that was the supreme thrill.
Harlan Ellison
Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead...."Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something...
Italo Calvino
Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgement, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility.
John Stuart Mill
I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.
Samuel Beckett
[Y]ou weren't born with a talent for witchcraft: it didn't come easily; you worked hard at it because you wanted it. You forced the world to give it to you, no matter the price, and the price is and always will be high... People say you don't find witchcraft; witchcraft finds you. But you've found it, even if at the time you didn't know what it was you were finding, and you grabbed it by its scrawny neck and made it work for you.
Terry Prachett