Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

They go to Paris to learn how to make bombs and they come back having learned only how to write poetry, which they think is more explosive.

They looked at her quizzically, came at her with assumptions, presumptions, what they believed was intimate knowledge of her. She felt unarmed, by comparison; disadvantaged.

They paid people to write books!!! Until that moment I had a vague idea that books were produced in factories, like tires, or else they grew on trees, like money.

They're just clothes,' she remembered writing down in the leafy, thin pages of her journal. 'And the warmth of them no longer comforts you nor belongs to you. They're just fabric without an owner. A familiarity that has faded and an attachment that no longer has a name, just a brand mark stitched into the seams.' She remembered her hand flowing quickly and purposefully across the page as her eyes shifted from the journal to the sweater to the journal again. 'And when I slip them over my head. I smell not your fragrance and feel no longer the emptiness you left behind. I see me in a mirror, with a sweater on. And I look as radiant and beautiful, and broken, and whole, and relentlessly happy as you left me.

They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don’t have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

They're a group called The Spirit-crushers and their leader is known as The Almighty Spirit-crusher.

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. I say its closer to 675 or 700.

They're waiting for you to say all these grand statements, you know? You march across the room and you're supposed to say 'DEATH HAS TWELVE WINGS LIKE THE ANGEL OF HELL!' but people aren't built that way. You can only say 'Hey, uh, baby, why don't ya' make me a cup of coffee?

They say, poetry is dead. I say, was there ever a time they had a clue of what the state of poetry is?

They say that writers face the blank page. That's not true. It's more like 200 hundred blank pages!

They that be born in the strength of youth are of one fashion, and they that are born in the time of age, when the womb fail, are otherwise.

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. But if there's a shirtless guy on your cover, or your title includes the words billionaire, alpha-male, werewolf or werebear, your "book" is probably a pile of unimaginative, derivative drivel devoid of a single original thought. Yet another poorly written romance clone the world didn't need.

They were completely alone on the long stretch of country road and there was no one else to share the moment with them.

They want to be stimulated. They want to read something that can get under their skin and hang out there for a while.

Thine own things, and such as are grown up with thee, canst thou not know; How should thy vessel then be able to comprehend the way of the Highest, and, the world being now outwardly corrupted to understand the corruption that is evident in my sight?

Things not going right? Just write!

Thinking before writing how I feel. That's how I'm able to write all the lies and wrongs. How else can one write something like a fake smile ?

Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words have the ability to change our lives simply by being next to each other.

Think of a caterpillar entering a cocoon. Once he does so, one of two things will happen: He will either transform into a butterfly, or he will die. But no matter what else happens, he will never climb out of the cocoon as a caterpillar. So it is with your protagonist.

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Queene, Proserpina's garden, glistening bright among the place's ashes and cinders, may have seen in his mind's eye, apple of his eye, the golden fruit of the Primavera, may have seen Paradise Lost, in the garden where Eve recalled Pomona and Proserpina. He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, un unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes.

This bitterly cold weather is a shift from an even colder half of year. It's as if we're back to some sort of embryonic development that brought us to where we started: an inertia of life— changing positions like atoms within a molecule— the cruel, cruel curse of the winter sunset... a reminder that natural light comes and goes as it damn well pleases.

This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him he succeeds better than if he copies, with the help of a magnifying glass, objects placed outside of him.

think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

This book is about having the courage to stand in the ever-crooked room of black womanhood and summon the magic to set it straight. Even if only for a moment, the act alone heals you just enough for the next tilt of the room.

This didn't sound good. It sounded like the optimism was escaping from him.

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.

This has been done by masters of the trade and Garcia had taken in every stock situation with amazing powers of retention, but he had not put things together right and had used extraordinary discernment in not adding one single touch of originality.

This imaginary gift is a journey for your imagination. I send you... A luxury train ride. On this train are all the inspiring people you've ever wanted to meet or talk to. You glide from car to car, sitting or lying down on velvet lounge chairs, listening and asking questions. There is also a voluminous library on the train, with every book you've ever wanted to read or look at. Kind people bring you delicious tidbits to eat and nourishing liquids to drink. If you take a nap, time stands still until you return so you never miss anything. You receive a large journal filled with photographs, drawings and descriptions of your journey to take with you when you leave. You realize that you can board this train at any time.

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

… this is my first language.” {on Writing}

This is not the first time that the world has been in a mess but you are still God, you left us on the earth, not only to preach in a building but to be the church beyond the buildings.

This is our skin and nobody has the right to crumple us like a paper only to find another skin to write on, and then another, ruining people like they’re pages, like they are somehow replaceable. Because that will only leave our delicate and fragile selves into a tattered mess.

This is the best time to be an author.

This is what is behind the special relationship between tale and travel, and, perhaps, the reason why narrative writing is so closely bound up with walking. To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain that the author as guide - a guide one may not always agree with our trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take one somewhere. I have have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into distances so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is traveling.

This is the reason I write, to remind people of honor and courage; to tell them that their cause isn’t lost, that their destiny is victory.

This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself. I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night.

This is where I long to get home to after vacation. This is where I feel comfy in my pajamas. This is where, no matter where I go, my bed is here and none is better than my own. When I think about you, you can never be him... When once upon a time ago, I never thought there WAS a him that could ever be you.

This is the story I am working on. But it isn't complete as I don't have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes over time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they're put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn't one. I see that if I am lucky and do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end.

This is your moment now. Go for it. LIVE. Choose to be happy. Choose the life you always wanted. Never settle for anything nor less than any good. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to enjoy this life. For God sake, enjoy living your life to the fullest.

This is why you use imagery when writing about sex; it’s a means both of evoking immediacy and of distilling emotion.

This may not be art as art commonly goes; the lack of discipline, of control, would seem to rule it out of that category. And yet Woolrich's lack of control over emotions is a crucial element in his work, not only because it intensifies the fragility and momentariness of love but also because it tears away the comfortable belief, evident in some of the greatest works of the human imagination such as Oedipus Rex, that nobility in the face of nothingness is possible. And if Woolrich's work is not art as commonly understood, there is an art beyond art, whose form is not the novel or story but the scream; and of this art Woolrich is beyond doubt a master. ("Introduction")

This is where we work, in the interstices of ignorance, the land of contradiction and silence, planning to convince you with the seemingly known, to resolve - or make usefully vivid - the contradiction, and to make the silence eloquent.

This is why people like writing. You visit old friends without having to go on Facebook and see what they're up to and deal with what idiots call FOMO. You make them into what you want them to be, the people they could be if only they were braver, smarter.

This question of grades being coercive, and of politics being inherent in teaching, applies not only to writing, but to all fields. Mathematics, science, economics, history, religion, are all just as deeply and necessarily political. To believe they’re not—to believe, for example, that science (or mathematics, economics, history, religion, and so forth: choose your poison) describes the world as it is, rather than acting as a filter that removes all information that does not fit the model and colors the information that remains—is in itself to take a position, one that is all the more powerful and dangerous because it is invisible to the one who holds it.

This poem was meant to be unwritten. But I am writing it now and have thereby changed destiny.

This story is always yours for the telling. This has always been yours. You can expand to fill it all or take up the smallest corner. You can write in invisible ink. You can tell your story in red wine stains and spilled ink and bite marks. You can only write in pencil so it can always be erased. You can write in layers, and turn the page and write sideways. You can spin spiral and make your words dance. You can ink it on the surface of your skin or x-ray vision the story onto the blank canvas of your bones. You can write a novel and then let the whole thing dissolve in the waves. You can write the truth and bury it in the ground, throw it in the fire, fold it into paper airplanes and watch it fly, roll it into a note in a bottle and toss it in the ocean and let it find its own way home. Or, you share it with the whole fucking world. You can care and not care and care-not-care all at once. But you get to write. And you get to choose the story you tell. And there’s no freedom bigger or bolder or braver than that.

This was a notebook made for a girl who liked to write, who took each word seriously and put it down with care.

This world rubs me raw, scours me smooth like an SOS pad put to a grease-caked skillet. And pain: it stabs and scrapes and pulls me back to earth, my final B&B, that worm-spun cot of cool black sod.