Mass Quotes #15
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
- Oscar Wilde
“Most people don’t realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn’t value its librarians doesn’t value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?”
- Neil Gaiman
“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your book, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
- Stephen King
“Finish every day and be done with it… You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it…serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
- Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
All Nature is but art, unknown to thee
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial even, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
- Alexander Pope, Essay on Man
“When you’re in the present, you’re living your life. You’re not caught up in what could’ve been or what might be.”
- Better Off Ted
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.”
- Jorge Luis Borges
“I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, “Is he as crazy as I am?” I don’t need that question answered.”
- Philip Roth
“Let’s just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I’ll be me, today and today and today, and let’s trust the future to tomorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies.”
- Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl
“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with the objective curiosity all the time.”
-Sylvia Plath
“Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.”
- Daniel DeFoe, Robinson Crusoe
“I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?”
- John Lennon
“I’m not always going to be like this,” Scarlett said. “I’ve been useful to you, right?”
“Many times,” Dakota said, leading her along. “Sometimes, we all get a little broken.”
A little broken. Scarlett wondered about that. At what point do you get so broken that it’s time to just get thrown away? She had a feeling she was about to find out.
- Maureen Johnson, Scarlett Fever
“There’s no race, no religion, no class system, no colour—nothing—no sexual orientation, that makes us better than anyone else. We’re all deserving of love.”
- Sandra Bullock, Oscars acceptance speech for Best Actress in The Blind Side
“An ‘anyway’ friend is the one person in your life, who no matter what they say or do, no matter what they’ve been through with you, they love you anyway.”
- Private Practice
“Speaking as a writer, I’m not interested in trends, I want to write books that are honest, with characters as true to the inner world of the story as I can make them.”
- Susan Patron in an interview with American Libraries about The Higher Power of Lucky
This is how it works
You’re young until you’re not
You love until you don’t,
You try until you can’t,
You laugh until you cry,
You cry until you laugh,
And everyone must breath,
Until their dying breath.
- Regina Spektor, On the Radio
Mass Quotes #10
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
-Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
“We tend to think things are new because we’ve just discovered them.”
-Charles Wallace, Madeleine L’Engle, A Wind in the Door
“When I was called to you,” Gaudior corrected. “And When is not what matters. It’s what happens in the When that matters.”
-Madeleine L’Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet
“Questions, questions.” Gaudior stomped one silver hoof. “I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.”
-Madeleine L’Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet
The author determines the text; the reader determines its meaning.
-John Green
“Let’s face it Aaron, we’re just too different: You like Stephen Hawking. I like Stephen King. You know it would never have worked.”
-Mel, Meg Cabot, The Boy Next Door
“You cannot imagine how time…can be…so still.
It hangs. It weighs. And yet there is so little of it.
It goes so slowly, and yet it is so scarce.”
-Margaret Edson, Wit
“Of course,” Brigitte said. “Adults have big, big wishes that we do not expect to come true. That is why we need so many more candles on our cakes.”
-Susan Patron, Lucky Breaks
Mass Quotes #4
Today’s my last day of summer school, so hopefully I’ll be able to update this more often again. The good thing about summer school though is that I read a ton of amazing books for my children’s literature class, so I’ve got lots of new quotes for you. I’m waiting to take my children’s lit exam right now actually, so I don’t know how many I can post at the moment, but let’s find out.
“And even if you carry a survival kit around with you at all times, it won’t guarantee you’ll survive. No kit in the world can protect you from all the possible bad things.”
-Susan Patron, The Higher Power of Lucky
“The world is a wonderful place when you’re young.”
-Goose, E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
“I don’t think it’s normal. You know perfectly well animals don’t talk.”
Mr. Arable grinned. “Maybe our ears aren’t as sharp as Fern’s,” he said.
-E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults.
-Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Something was happening — no one was sure what. But out there back of beyond, far past the coastal ranges and the leagues of forest, the land changed and began opening to the sky.
-John Madson, Where the Sky Began
“Stand up and walk. Keep going forward. At least you have strong legs to take you there.”
-Ed, Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 1
“But you will be faced now,” she explained gently, “with a pain of a magnitude that none of us here can comprehend because it is beyond our experience. The Receiver himself was not able to describe it, only to remind us that you would be faced with it, that you would need immense courage. We cannot prepare you for that.
“But we feel certain that you are brave,” she said to him.
-Lois Lowry, The Giver
Rules and Things Number 83: If an adult tells you not to worry, and you weren’t worried before, you better hurry up and start ’cause you’re already running late.
-Christopher Paul Curtis, Bud, Not Buddy
“But Grandmamma,” I said, “if nobody has ever seen The Grand High Witch, how can you be so sure she exists?”
My grandmother gave me a long and very severe look. “Nobody has ever seen the Devil,” she said,” but we know he exists.”
-Roald Dahl, The Witches
I found myself thinking, What’s so wonderful about being a little boy anyway? Why is that necessarily any better than being a mouse? I know that mice get hunted and they sometimes get poisoned or caught in traps. But little boys sometimes get killed, too. Little boys can be run over by motor-cars or they can die of some awful illness. Little boys have to go to school. Mice don’t. Mice don’t have to pass exams. Mice don’t have to worry about money. Mice, as far as I can see, have only two enemies, humans and cats. My grandmother is a human, but I know for certain she will always love me whoever I am. And she never, thank goodness, keeps a cat. When mice grow up, they don’t ever have to go to war and fight against other mice. Mice, I felt pretty certain, all like each other. People don’t.
-Roald Dahl, The Witches
If you’re looking for good reads this summer I highly recommend all of these (except for Where the Sky Began, that’s a boring book about the prairie I had to read for Eco). I’m having trouble deciding if my new favorite children’s book is The Witches, if it’s The Higher Power of Lucky, or if it will continue to be Through the Looking Glass. Probably Looking Glass, but the other two are definitely vying for second place.
Mass Quotes #3
Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.
-Lewis Carroll
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.”
-Lewis Carroll,
Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
-E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.
-E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
I am in earnest–I will not equivocate–I will not excuse–I will not retreat a single inch–and I will be heard.
-William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator
I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.
-Frederick Douglas
Just the sound of those chimes made Lucky feel cooler. But she still had doubts and anxious questions in all the crevices of her brain, especially about how to find her Higher Power.
If she could only find it, Lucky was pretty sure she’d be able to figure out the difference between the things she could change and the things she couldn’t, like in the little prayer of the anonymous people. Because sometimes Lucky wanted to change everything, all the bad things that had happened, and sometimes she wanted everything to stay the same forever.
-Susan Patron, The Higher Power of Lucky
Then that sign that still said POP. 43 would really be wrong. But what Lucky wanted most was for that sign to stay the same forever, with no subtracting allowed.
-Susan Patron, The Higher Power of Lucky
