SOME FAVORITE QUOTES FROM BOOKS:
“It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
“He was one of the fortunate ones: he’d emerged from childhood a whole person, and his past wasn’t some vast, unmovable mass with its own weather system.”
― Jen Beagin, Pretend I’m Dead
“The officer of the court was a good old boy with a meaty backwoods beard and a hungover wobble to his step. He’d outgrown his shirt and the pressure against the buttons made him look upholstered. But he was a white man with a pistol so despite his dishevelment he sent a vibration.”
― Colson Whitehead
“I got drunk that night, banjoed drunk, drunker than I’d been in about fifteen years. I spent half the night sitting on the bathroom floor, staring glassily at the toilet and wishing I could just throw up and get it over with. The edges of my vision pulsed, sickening with every heartbeat, and the shadows in the corners flicked and throbbed and contorted themselves into spiky, nasty little crawling things that were gone in the next blink. Finally, I realized that. while the nausea showed no sign of getting better, it probably wasn’t going to get any worse. I staggered into my room and fell asleep on top of the covers without taking off my clothes.”
― Tana French
“A sunrise threatened Dani’s chest, but she shoved it down, barely wincing when the heat stung her palms. They were co-conspirators, after all. They were in the midst of a plot. A plot that required Zaf to to around her, and do nice things for her, and look at her with eyes like fire gleaming off midnight water.”
― Talia Hibbert
QUOTES ABOUT WRITING:
“It takes years to write a book⎯between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant…
Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly places through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
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“It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.”
─ C. J. Cherryh
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
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“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
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“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.”
—Oscar Wilde
“Be obscure clearly.”
—E B White
“You can always fix crap. You can’t fix a blank page.”
─ Christina Dodd
