Turning Quotes (page 93)
I'm a writer and this is what I do no matter what name we put to it. Year by year, the world is turning into a darker and stranger place than any of us could want. This is the only thing I do that has potential to shine a little further than my immediate surroundings. For me, each story is a little candle held up to the dark of night, trying to illuminate the hope for a better world where we all respect and care for each other.
Charles de Lint
When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The...
John McPhee
Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass...There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.
George MacDonald
Never in her life had she seen such literary men. They were incredibly vain, but made no secret of it, as though they were so on principle. Some (though by no means all) turned up drunk, but they seemed to regard it as some new manifestation of grace they had discovered only the day before. They all appeared to be quite extraordinarily proud of something. On all faces was written that they had only just discovered some highly important secret.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I want someone who can sit me down, shut me up, tell me ten things I don't already know and make me laugh. I don't care what you look like, just turn me on. And if you can do that, I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow. I will nibble your mukluks with my own teeth. I will do your windows. I will care about your feelings. Just have something in there.
Henry Rollins
He went to bed early, but could not fall asleep. He was haunted by sad and gloomy reflections about the inevitable en? death. These thoughts were familiar to him, many times had he turned them over this way and that, first shuddering at the probability of annihilation, then welcoming it, almost rejoicing in it. Suddenly a peculiarly familiar agitation took possession of hi? He mused awhile, sat down at the table, and wrote down the following lines in his sacred copy-book, without a single...
Ivan Turgenev
Unlike me, he realized that Dustfinger would do anything in return for such a promise. All he wants is to go back to his own world. He doesn't even stop to ask if his story there has a happy ending!"Well, that's no different from real life," remarked Elinor gloomily. "You never know if things will turn out well. Just now our own story looks like it's coming to a bad end.
Cornelia Funke