You Like It Quotes (page 169)
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The wrong words. They were true a hundred times over, yet they sounded like a lie. Hadn't he always know it? Words were useless. At times they might sound wonderful, but they let you down the moments you really needed them . You could never find the right words, never, and where would you look for them? The heart is a silent as a fish, however much the tongue tries to give it a voice.
Cornelia Funke
Matthew,' she said, 'have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?'
For a moment he did not answer. Taking up the decanter he held it to the light.
'Robin can go anywhere, do anything,' Nora continued, 'because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.' She came toward him. 'Matthew,' she said, 'you think I have always been like this. Once I was remorseless, but this is another love — it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop — it rots me away.
Djuna Barnes
We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of the meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.
Tobias Wolff
Comrade, I did not want to kill you. . . . But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. . . . I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same...
Erich Maria Remarque
Heroism's just doing more than you want to do or think you can. Sometimes it's just doing the crappy things, the unhappy things other people won't do....It's not just jumping out of a plane onto a glacier ten thousand feet up because there's nobody else there to do it. It's getting out of bed in the morning when it seems like too much trouble.
Nora Roberts
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to...
Jack Kerouac
Max—you have a bigger mission than finding the flock's parents. Focus on helping the whole world,
not just your friends.
I held my wings steady, coasting for a long, long way on a warm updraft. It was like floating on a
cloud, the best feeling you can imagine. I wish you could try it with me. Maybe next time.
You know, Voice, I thought finally, my friends are my world.
James Patterson
Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?
V. S. Naipaul
B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.''Of course you do,' I said, 'everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox. Go home and go to bed and take some hot lemonade and put on three blankets and sweat it out.''But Mr J-Jimson, there must be artists.''Yes, and lunatics and lepers, but why go and live in an asylum before you're sent for? If you find life a bit dull at home,' I said, 'and want to amuse yourself, put a stick of dynamite in the...
Joyce Cary
Cheap heroism is always easy, and even to sacrifice life is easy too; because it is only a case of hot blood and an overflow of energy, and there is such a longing for what is beautiful! No, take the deed of heroism that is labourious, obscure, without noise or flourish, slandered, in which there is a great deal of sacrifice and not one grain of glory - in which you, a splendid man, are made to look like a scoundrel before every one, though you might be the most honest man in the world - you...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
fiction writing is like duck hunting. You go to the right place at the right time with the right dog. You get into the water before dawn, wearing a little protective gear, then you stand behind some reeds and wait for the story to present itself...You choose the place and the day. You pick the gun and the dog. You have the desire to blow the duck apart for reasons that are entirely your own. But you have to be willing to accept not what you wanted to have happen, but what happens... By...
Ann Patchett
And when you do find this letter, you know what? Something extraordinary will happen. It will be like a reverse solar eclipse - the sun will start shining down in the middle of the night, imagine that! - and when I see this sunlight it will be my signal to go running out into the streets, and I'll shout over and over, "Awake! Awake! The son of mine who once was lost has now been found!" I'll pound on every door in the city, and my cry will ring true: "Awake! Everyone listen, there has been a...
Doug Coupland
Armies have spent a lot of time and effort training their soldiers not to think of the enemy as human beings. It’s so much easier to kill them if you think of them as dangerous animals. The trouble is, war isn’t about killing. It’s about getting the enemy to stop resisting your will. Like training a dog not to bite. Punishing him leaves you with a beaten dog. Killing him is a permanent solution, but you’ve got no dog. If you can understand why he’s biting and remove the conditions that...
Orson Scott Card