I often hear, or read a quote that grabs my attention. Some are witty, some prophetic, and some reflect the challenges in life. Regardless, I’d like to share one each week. Enjoy!
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. you send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success–but only if you persist–Isaac Asimov
One reason I don’t drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time–Lady Astor
A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject matter–Henri Mattise
So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty. All other pacts of love or fear derive from it and are modeled upon it–Haniel Long
Honour makes men faithful in keeping secrets, and therefore unwilling to receive them, for secrets are like red-hot ploughshares. Only saints can walk safely between them–Henry Cardinal Manning
When I meet a new person, I am on the lookout for signs of what he or she is loyal to. It is a preliminary clue to the sense of belonging, and hence of his or her humanity–Haniel Long
So, too, our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical, sentimental irresponsibility, and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values–Helen Merrell Lynd
The history of the past is the story of all truths that man has released–Andre Gide
We find comfort among those who agree with us and growth among those who don’t–Frank A. Clark
When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.–E.W. Howe
Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me–Carl Sandburg
A book is a friend; a good book is a good friend. It will talk to you when you want it to talk, and it will keep still when you want it to keep still–and there are not many friends who know enough to do that–Lyman Abbott
The demands of modern living are so exacting that men and woman everywhere must exercise deliberate selection to live wisely–Robert Grant
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write–W. Somerset Maugham
It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father–Pope John XXIII
Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young–W. Somerset Maugham
The suggestiveness of summer!–a word that is so weighted with the fullness of existence–means more to me than any other word in the language, I think–Edward Martin Taber
The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek–Robert Louis Stevenson
Every calling is great when greatly pursued–Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A sense of curiosity is nature’s original school of education–Dr. Smiley Blanton
Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel certain that they mean something else–Oscar Wilde
Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed–P.G. Wodehouse
Nowhere does the unpredictable, the unusual excite such confusion as in that settled institution–the church–David Grayson
I thought that nature was enough, till human nature came–Emily Dickenson
No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted–Olive Schreiner
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s–Stephen King
If only one could have two lives: the first, in which to make one’s mistakes, which seem as if they had to be made; and the second in which to profit by them–D.H. Lawrence
The primary duty of literature is to tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed–Stephen King
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science–Albert Einstein
We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction–Aldous Huxley
You never realize death until you realize love–Katharine Butler Hathaway
Very often, a change of self is needed more than a change of scene–A.C. Benson
One day in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful–Sigmund Freud
There are certain things that grab people in a song; in the business we call them “hooks.” You can’t look for hooks when you’re writing, they just happen to come about. You can recognize them only when they’re done–Burt Bacharach
Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being–A.A. Milne
I never had to choose a subject–my subject rather chose me–Ernest Hemingway
Substitute ‘damn’ for every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be–Mark Twain
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life–Mark Twain
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education–Mark Twain
The things we do at Christmas are touched with a certain extravagance, as beautiful in some of its aspects, as the extravagance of Nature in June–Robert Collyer
Our life is so dependent on our relations with women–and the opposite, of course, is also true–that it seems to me one must never think lightly of them–Vincent Van Gogh
The first fall of snow is not only an event but it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up to find yourself in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment, then where is it to be found?–J.B. Priestley
Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition–Alexander Smith
Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate–John F. Kennedy
Almost all words do have color and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone’s eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too–Gladys Taber
Old houses, I thought, do not belong to people ever, not really, people belong to them–Gladys Taber
Do not protect yourself by a fence, but rather by your friends–Czech Proverb
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of idea–George Santayana
If you get an impulse in a scene, no matter how wrong it seems, follow the impulse. It might be something, and if it ain’t–take two!–Jack Nicholson
It would seem that you don’t be having any good luck until you believe there is no such thing as luck in it at all–Irish proverb
Weep if you must, parting is hell. But life goes on, so sing as well–Joyce Greenfell
It is beautiful to watch a fine horse gallop, the long stride, the rush of the wind as he passes–my heart beats quicker to the thud of the hoofs and I feel his strength. Gladly would I have the strength of the Tartar stallion roaming the wild steppe; that very strength, what vehemence of soul-thought would accompany it–Richard Jefferies
Reflection: Wisdom’s best nurse–John Milton
Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future–John F. Kennedy
It is better to walk alone, than with a crowd going in the wrong direction–Herman Siu
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in–Greek proverb
Lust is more abstract than logic; it seeks (hope triumphing over experience) for some purely sexual, hence purely imaginary, conjunction of an impossible maleness with an impossible femaleness–C.S. Lewis
Perfection never exists in reality but only in our dreams and, if we are foolish enough to think so, in the past. But the notion of perfection is very real and has tremendous power in disparaging whatever is actually at hand–Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs
Vacations, no matter how long they last, always seem too short–Jean Gautier
If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what, then is an empty desk a sign(of)?–Albert Einstein
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed–Ernest Hemingway
There are several good protections against temptations but the surest is cowardice–Mark Twain
The art of our time is noisy with appeals to silence–Susan Sontag
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery–Winston Churchill
The choice between life and death is ever-recurrent. In varying forms it appears whenever a new adaptation is needed or a new potential is ready to be born–Frances G. Wickes
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young–Oscar Wilde
There are three hard and fast rules to writing. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are–W. Somerset Maugham
A writer is a world trapped inside a person–Victor Hugo
Literary criticism is constantly attempting a very absurd thing–the explanation of (a) passionate utterance by (an) utterance that is unimpassioned: it is like trying to paint a sunset in lamp black–John Davidson
Anybody who thinks that war is pleasant…you know, the old veteran stuff. You know, “War is great stuff.” Well, it’s great for the survivors–not great for the people who are killed in it–Bernard B. Fall
(P.S. Though I respect Mr. Fall’s view, the aftermath of war isn’t always so great for many of the survivors either. I salute you all–GRM)
If there is anything that a man can do and do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance–Abraham Lincoln
You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say–F. Scott Fitzgerald
We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them–Kahlil Gibran
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down…. If it is a good book, nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him–Edna St. Vincent Millay
If you tell the truth (about everything), you won’t have to remember anything–Mark Twain
The Sabbath is what you make of it–a holy day, a rest day, a sports day–or, if you’re not smart, another work day–Herbert L. Goldstein
We do the best we can and hope for the best, knowing that “the best,” so far as selling goes, is a matter of chance. The only thing that is not chance is what one asks of oneself and how well or how badly one meets one’s own standards–May Sarton
The reward of friendship is itself. The man who hopes for anything else does not understand what true friendship is–Saint Aldred of Rievaulx
The habit of courtesy, when once acquired, is almost impossible to get rid of–Robert Lynd
Unlike the architect, an author often discards his blueprint in the process of erecting his edifice. To the writer, a book is something to be lived through, an experience, not a plan to be executed in accordance with laws and specifications–Henry Miller
Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles in the cold–Andre Maurois
You know your day is going to be a challenge when you start it by dropping your mascara wand in the toilet–RA Miller
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read– Groucho Marx
We may all have come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now–Dr. Martin Luther King
