Would-Be Quotes
enjoying a tranquillity in which I
won’t write the works I don’t write now, and to keep on
not writing them I’ll come up with even better excuses
than the ones I use today to elude myself. Or I’ll be in an
institution for paupers, happy in my utter defeat, mixed
up with the rabble of would-be geniuses who were no more than beggars with dreams, thrown in with the
anonymous throng of those who didn’t have strength enough to conquer nor renunciation enough to conquer enough to conquer nor...
Fernando Pessoa
in a middle of a roomstands a suicidesniffing a Paper rosesmiling to a self"somewhere it is Spring and sometimespeople are in real: imaginesomewhere real flowers, but. I can't imagine real flowers for if Icould, they would somehownot Be real"(so he smilessmiling)"but I will noteverywhere be real toyou in a moment"The is blondwith small hands"& everything is easierthan I had guessed everything wouldbe; even remembering the way wholooked at whom first, anyhow dancing
E. E. Cummings
there are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see...or to at least shut up about what you do see that's different. they are agents of the status quo. not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.
Stephen King
Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.
Herman Hesse
she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway—a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe—all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the...
Truman Capote
A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is "a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God.'"The husband, unlike the "manager" or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble.
Wendell Berry
I do not believe that we can put into anyone ideas which are not in himalready. As a rule there is in everyone all sorts of good ideas, readylike tinder. But much of this tinder catches fire, or catches itsuccessfully, only when it meets some flame or spark from the outside, from some other person. Often, too, our own light goes out, and isrekindled by some experience we go through with a fellow man. Thus wehave each of us cause to think with deep gratitude of those who havelighted the...
Albert Schweitzer
When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.
Don DeLillo
We must know the truth; and we must avoid error,--these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as...
William James