Mass Quotes #16
“Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn’t stop for anybody.”
- Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
“All good books have one thing in common—they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you’ve read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and it belongs to you forever: the happiness and the unhappiness, the good and evil, ecstasy and sorry, the food, the wine, beds, people and weather. If you give that to a reader, then you’re a writer.”
- Ernest Hemingway
“To be nobody but yourself—in a word which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
- E.E. Cummings, A Poet’s Advice to Students
“Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now, isn’t that enough?”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.”
- Helen Fielding, Bridge Jones’s Diary
“We build too many walls and not enough bridges.”
- Isaac Newton
“Talented people turn me on. What a woman looks like means nothing to me—I’m only looking at the twinkle in their soul.”
- David Tennant
“For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.”
- Jean Dubuffet
“We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.”
- Nick Hornby
“No matter what anybody tells you…words and ideas can change the world.”
- The Dead Poet’s Society
“It has always been hard to be a teenager. It is not harder in 2010 than it was in 1985. I mean, come on! It’s hard to be alive.”
- Steph Bowe
“We are not the same person this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.”
- W. Somerset Maugham
“Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back.”
- Mal Reynolds, Firefly
“The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeeth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne’s story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band.”
- Philip K. Dick
“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”
- Ray Bradbury
“Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made up for paid for in factories.”
- Ray Bradbury
“Fairy tales are our way of telling children there are things out there that might want to eat them.”
- Stephen Moffat
“You have to know what you stand for, not just what you stand against.”
- Laurie Halse Anderson
“While no one is expected to leap tall buildings in a single bound, our aspiring heroes will be tested on their courage, integrity, self-sacrifice, compassion and resourcefulness—the stuff of all true superheroes.”
- Stan Lee
“You don’t have to agree with everything your friends do. You’re allowed to think they’re wrong, you’re allowed to think they’re stupid sometimes, but that doesn’t mean you get to judge them. You have to accept what they decide and respect them, even if you think it’s wrong or silly.”
- Jordyn Turney, Love or Something Like It: Book 3
“The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.”
- H.G. Wells
“Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what one is saying.”
- John Updike
“Books aren’t written—they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.”
- Michael Crichton
Mass Quotes #14
“A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories”
- John Irving
“Writing is one of the few careers for which you essentially train yourself, the other two majors ones being juggling and pickpocketing.”
- Maureen Johnson
“”Sometimes I feel like I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me when I can be normal again,” she said, “I keep thinking I’ll get a letter. Or a call. When does it happen?”
Pete looked like he wanted to walk toward her, but then he fell back against the car. The staring contest between them for almost a minute, and finally Pete exhaled loudly.
“It’s okay,” he said.”
- Maureen Johnson, The Key to the Golden Firebird
“Maybe you’ve never fallen into a frozen stream. Here’s what happens.
1. It is cold. So cold that the Department of Temperature Acknowledgment and Regulation in you brain gets the readings and says, “I can’t deal with this. I’m out of here.” It puts up the OUT TO LUNCH sign and passes all responsibility to the…
2. Department of Pain and the Processing Thereof, which gets all this gobbledygook from the temperature department that it can’t understand. “This is so not our job,” it says. So it just starts hitting random buttons, filling you with strange and unpleasant sensations, and calls the…
3. Office of Confusion and Panic, where there is always someone ready to hop on the phone the moment it rings. This office is at least willing to take some action. The Office of Confusion and Panic loves hitting buttons.”
- Maureen Johnson
Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn’t occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.
- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
“So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding. “
- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
“Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future–you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.”
- John Green, Paper Towns
“All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.”
- Ernest Hemingway
“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
- Ernest Hemingway
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”
- Ernest Hemingway
“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
- Ernest Hemingway
Mass Quotes #13
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
- Neil Gaiman
“Saying ‘I notice you’re a nerd’ is like saying, ‘Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?’ In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even ‘lame’ is kind of lame. Saying ‘You’re lame’ is like saying ‘You walk with a limp.’ Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he’s done all right for himself.”
- John Green
I try to live life so that I can live with myself.
- John Green
Here’s to all the places we went. And all the places we’ll go. And here’s to me, whispering again and again and again and again: iloveyou.
- John Green, Looking for Alaska
“Influenced by my hopeless romantic and super sensitive mindset, I pay far too much attention to the little things in life and in the relationship between two people. In constant need of reassurance, explanation, closure, and attention, my paintings are made.”
- Kurt Halsey
By the time Lionel was six, he knew what he wanted to be.
John Wayne.
Not the actor, but the character. Not the man, but the hero. The John Wayne who cleaned up cattle towns and made them safe for decent folk. The John Wayne who shot guns out of the hands of outlaws. The John Wayne who saved stagecoaches and wagon trains from Indian attacks.
When Lionel told his father he wanted to be John Wayne, his father said it might be a good idea, but that he should keep his options open.
- Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water
In the end all that’s left is the beating of my heart, the in and out of my breath. Of Sarah’s. Tayshawn’s. The rest of us who are left behind.
We still tick. We still tock.
It hurts.
- Justine Larbalestier, LIAR
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
– Orson Scott Card
But who needs love when there’s Law and Order?
And who needs love when there’s Southern Comfort?
And who needs love when the sandwiches are wicked
and they know you at the Mac store?
- Amanda Palmer, Leeds United
Give in to love or live in fear. No other path, no other way. No day but today.
- Jonathan Larson, Rent
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
- Carl Jung
Life can sometimes suck. Like, a lot. People will break your trust. Secrets will fly and everyone will turn on each other. But you’ll keep going. Life doesn’t stop because it’s especially sucky. Such is the way of the world. Also: There are some friends who are abso-bloody-lutely wonderful. Keep a hold of them.
- Casye Davidson
“When you’re a kid you assume your parents are soulmates. My kids are going to be right about that.”
- Pam Beesly, The Office
But don’t forget who you really are. And I’m not talking about your so-called real name. All names are made up by someone else, even the one your parents gave you. You know who you really are. when you’re alone at night, looking up at the stars, or maybe lying in your bed in total darkness, you know that nameless person inside you… Your muscles with toughen. So will your heart and soul. That’s necessary for survival. But don’t lose touch with that person deep inside you, or else you won’t really have survived at all.
- Louis Sachar
“I’ve kissed a guy… I’ve kissed guys. I just haven’t felt that thing… that thing… That moment when you kiss someone and everything around you becomes hazy, and the only thing in focus is you and this person. And you realize that that person is the only person you’re supposed to kiss for the rest of your life. And for one moment you get this amazing gift. and you wanna laugh and you wanna cry, cause you feel so lucky that you’ve found it, and so scared that it’ll go away all at the same time.”
- Drew Berrymore, “Never Been Kissed”
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own.
And you know what you know.
And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go.
- Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
“I’ve lost everything: my job, my future, everything people think is important, but I don’t care – because even if I have to dig ditches for the rest of my life, I shall be a ditch-digger who once had a wonderful day.”
- Cornelius Hackl, Hello Dolly
“Smile, it enhances your face value”
- Dolly Parton in Steel Magnolias
Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts? Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts. So it’s fairly simple to cut right through the mess and to stop the muscle that makes us confess. We are so fragile, and our cracking bones make noise. And we are just breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.
- Ingrid Michaelson, Breakable
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?
- Ernest Hemingway
The world is ours, ours for the taking.
Yes there’s scars, but nothing that a little love won’t heal.
- Seabird, Trust
I know you’ve been afraid,
that’s why you stay awake all night and sleep through the day.
Hoping to find a hand you can hold, before you grow up and grow old.
- Seabird, This Ain’t Home
