Mass Quotes #17
I believe it’s been a hell of a year and I believe that in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we will all be okay.
– Izzie Stevens, Grey’s Anatomy
Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy someone a book than it is to buy them the whole world!
– Neil Gaiman
He had what Avery called “fetal motherboard syndrome”: he had to be touching some kind of online device at all times or he became skittish.
– Maureen Johnson, The Bermudez Triangle
“This book is pushing me, Zillah, making me write it. It excites me, and it drives me. In its pages, myth and matter merge. What happens in one time can make a difference in what happens in another time, far more than we realize. What Gedder does is going to make a difference, to the book, perhaps to the world. Nothing, no one is too small to matter. What you do is going to make a difference.”
– Matthew Maddock in A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle
I draw because words are too unpredictable.
I draw because words are too limited.
If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning.
But when you draw a picture, everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, “That’s a flower.”
So I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me.
– Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
He heard Mrs. Kitteridge yelling from above. He couldn’t hear the worlds, but he understood that help was coming. He had only to keep Patty from falling away, and as they went again beneath the swirling, sucking water, he strengthened his grip on her arm to let her know: He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing through each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.
– Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure, but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
Dreams; The Great Gatsby
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He hd come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms out farther…And one fine morning–So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Friends; The Great Gatsby
“Let us learn to show friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
-Wolfshiem; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
God knows; The Great Gatsby
“God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!”
-Wilson; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
People; The Great Gatsby
A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: ‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.’
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Accident; The Great Gatsby
“It takes two to make an accident.”
-Jordan, F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Smile; The Great Gatsby
He smiled understandingly–much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistable prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Fools; The Great Gatsby
“She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool–that’s be best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” “You see, I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so–the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
-Daisy; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Criticism; The Great Gatsby
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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