Then Quotes (page 103)
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It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'Its a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business ofice, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer.
J. D. Salinger
It was necessary that I leave Schruns and go to New York to rearrange publishers. I did my business in. New York and when I got back to Paris I should have caught the first train from the Gare de 1'Est that would take me down to Austria. But the girl I was in love with was in Paris then, and I did not take the first train, or the second or the third.
Ernest Hemingway
For the fact is thatneither the grammarian nor any other person of skill ever makes a mistakein so far as he is what his name implies; they none of them err unlesstheir skill fails them, and then they cease to be skilled artists. Noartist or sage or ruler errs at the time when he is what his name implies; though he is commonly said to err.
Plato
Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth. At its source you will find the answer to question whether you must write. Accept it, however it sounds to you, without analyzing. Perhaps it will become apparent to you that you are indeed called to be a writer. Then accept that fate; bear its burden, and its grandeur, without asking for the reward, which might possibly come from without.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Poem Written in a Copy of BeowulfAt various times, I have asked myself what reasonsmoved me to study, while my night came down, without particular hope of satisfaction, the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons. Used up by the years, my memoryloses its grip on words that I have vainlyrepeated and repeated. My life in the same wayweaves and unweaves its weary history. Then I tell myself: it must be that the soulhas some secret, sufficient way of knowingthat it is immortal, that its vast,...
Jorge Luis Borges
A splendid Midsummer shone over England: skies so pure, suns so radiant as were then seen in long succession, seldom favour, even singly, our wave-girt land. It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the South, like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest them on the cliffs of Albion. The hay was all got in; the fields round Thornfield were green and shorn; the roads white and baked; the trees were in their dark prime; hedge and wood, full-leaved and deeply tinted,...
Charlotte Bronte
She said she’d often wondered why she wanted to do some things and not do other things at all. Well, it was obvious with some things, but for others, there was no reason there. She’d spent a long time puzzling it out, then she thought that what you’d done in a past life you didn’t need to do again, and what you had to do in the future, you wouldn’t be ready to do now.
Jeanette Winterson
Only a fool wants war, but once a war starts then it cannot be fought half-heartedly. It cannot even be fought with regret, but must be waged with a savage joy in defeating the enemy, and it is that savage joy that inspires our bards to write their greatest songs about love and war.
Bernard Cornwell