Fictional or not, share your top five or top ten, whatever suits you. I do not have a list, yet. I will have to think for a bit, I feel like I'm forgetting some quotes.
There are so many great quotes - I shall give you three. The first draft of anything is shit. - Ernest Hemingway Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. - Groucho Marx A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. - George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
"There are no dead ends for those willing to find a way." -- Me "One step back and a whole new world opens up to you." -- Me "Look at the present because the past is long gone and the future does not exist." -- Me
"Love and dreams are two parentheses. Between them I place my body and discover the world." - Adonis, from "Celebrating Childhood"
from my collection of 'profundities': ...mine... That some do evil gives none the right to do evil in return. Having once recognized truth, one can never again take comfort or pleasure from its compromise. Philosophy is not something you can learn, but you can learn to think philosophically. ...profound blends... Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana Those who teach the past ensure that it will be repeated. maïa Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is. Albert Camus Man is the only creature that refuses to see what he is. maïa I think, therefore I am. René Descartes I am, therefore I will think. maïa ...profundities from the greats... The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Edmund Burke There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. Ayn Rand Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force. Dorothy Sayers ...for more: http://www.saysmom.com/maia/content.asp?Writing=112
"How we need another soul to cling to." - Sylvia Plath "You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone." - Al Capone "I'm a writer first and a singer second." - Lana del Rey
Two of my all-time favorite quotes: "Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserve and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours." - Ayn Rand "The old appeals to racial, sexual, and religious sphovianism, to rabid national fervor, are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism, and recognizies an organism at war with itself is doomed." - Carl Sagan
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” ― Robert E. Howard
"Be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master. There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught - they say - God, when he walked on earth." - Robinson Jeffers
My father has said some variation of this throughout raising me. This is the most recent: "No matter how passionate we are about something, no matter how much we love it, most of our work will be pure drudgery. Even the things we enjoy more than anything else will require dedication and perseverance and sheer force of will. More so on the days when we don't want to do what we love, on days we in fact hate it and ourselves more than our fears, on days we are ice-fucking-cold and wish we had never ever started this work in the first place. But those are just lies we tell ourselves, little bitty pieces of our ego getting in the way because we really want to cheat the system, to find the easy way out of work and all that it requires. But the trick is to keep yourself interested, to discipline and pose questions to yourself, so that you become disciplined in finding an answer, regardless of whatever it is you do, because when you're in search of an answer, nothing will ever stop you from finding it. Suddenly, you go from being cold to completely on fire, and then the work stops being work. It becomes enjoyment."
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase. Martin Luther King, Jr. Are two of my favorites so far.
“Be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough." - Paul Harding, Tinkers
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."― Ralph Waldo Emerson And no thread of quotes would be complete without some quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche: "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." "Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter." "Ah women. They make the highs highers and the lows more frequent."
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt.
