Quotes by Writers - Page 133

I'm not saying it's going to be easy; I'm saying it's going to be worth it. If it were easy, you would've done it by now
B. Dave Walters
May we each find in ourselves the courage we forgot we have, to see the beauty we forgot is inside us, while battling the demons we forgot we can slay, on a battlefield we forgot we can win.
Agnostic Zetetic
It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.
Joseph Campbell
That is what love does, it upstages fear.
Mia Hollow
Courage is just dreams with shoes on.
Reba Riley
Our long wanderings have made a man out of him, too. They have not only strengthened his frame and hardened his constitution, but they have given stability to his character. He is thoughtful and prudent, and his advice will always be valuable, while of his courage I have no doubt.
G.A. Henty
When you are in trouble, you need to put all your energies into thinking that there is a way out. Then, the bottom, the dark hole, becomes just a springboard from which you can leap so high that your head might hit a cloud.
Fatema Mernissi
... the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril,
Herman Melville
For whether a place is a heaven or a hell rests in yourself, and those who go with courage may find themselves in paradise.
Eva Ibbotson
... an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
Herman Melville
Everything happens for a reason, and nothing is an accident. It is all part of a much larger divine plan,” Duke Silverthorne said gravely, but in a surprisingly kind voice. “When difficulties come, we must see them as what they are—opportunities and a new path to discover your potential. How will you ever know the magnitude of courage you are capable of if you have never experienced the hopelessness of fear?
Farah Oomerbhoy
I had to stop running. I had to turn and face my life head on. It wasn’t enough being like everybody else; I had to be the best, and I was going to show everyone what I was truly made of. I was done with being a terrified princess, constantly waiting to be saved. I was going to be a queen, and, like Vivienne said, I had better start behaving like one. - (Aurora Firedrake)
Farah Oomerbhoy
Courage is continuing to perform your daily tasks, and being hopeful despite the odds, not inflicting your fears on others, and remaining sensitive to their needs and expectations, and also not supposing, because you're dying, nothing matters any more.
Leonard Michaels
If you weren't scared,you wouldn't be human,you wouldn't be brave.What do you mean? I ask.If you were fearless,you wouldn'tneed to overcome it.Bravery means being scaredand going forwardanyway, Fia says.That's courage
Leza Lowitz
If you weren't scared,you wouldn't be human,you wouldn't be brave.""What do you mean?" I ask."If you were fearless,you wouldn'tneed to overcome it.Bravery means being scaredand going forwardanyway," Fia says."That's courage.
Leza Lowitz
Only a small crack ... but cracks make caves collapse.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Inwardly, though, she was blown empty by a giant breath, and while they stood waiting for Mr. Henshaw to tie up the Clara she knew that she would never be the same poor, ignorant woman of an hour ago. She would be poor, all right, and she would be ignorant and she would be a woman, but never in the same ways.
M.F.K. Fisher
Courage consists, not in blindly overlooking danger, but in seeing and conquering it.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
Every man needs his Siren To check his courage and strength When he hears her song In his travels through the unknown.
Dejan Stojanovic
Nothing but courage can guide life.
Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues
Courage is more important than to be deceived by shallow victory waiting for a delayed defeat.
Dejan Stojanovic
[C]ourage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.
Samuel Johnson
I shall never again admire a merely brave man.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One cannot answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.
François de La Rochefoucauld
She was crushed by society like a mosquito fending for its unborn young
Owen Jones
People change. I mean you barely know who you are when you enter, and you spend that time figuring out what you want from life, and who you want in it. The next thing you know, the people you always thought would be there, aren't. A nd the person you thought you could trust with everything, isn't the person you ever knew at all.
Rebecca Donovan
Yotsuba: I’ll get revenge! … I’m going! Jumbo (in a suffering manner): Yotsuba… please, come back alive… Yotsuba (heroic): Alright. Even if I die… I’ll come back alive.—–Yotsuba!
Kiyohiko Azuma
What is the truth?’ he asked. ‘We place faith in ourselves,’ replied Altaïr (...) ‘We see the world as it really is, and hope that one day all mankind might see the same.’‘What is the world, then?’‘An illusion,’ replied Altaïr. ‘One we can either submit to – as most do – or transcend.’‘And what is it to transcend?’'To recognize that laws arise not from divinity, but reason. I understand now that our Creed does not command us to be free.’ And suddenly he really did understand. ‘It commands us to be wise
Oliver Bowden
They do not learn, fixed in their ways as they are. You are naïve tothink otherwise. It’s an illness, Assassin, for which there is but one cure.’‘You’re wrong. And that’s why you must be put to rest.’‘Am I not unlike those precious books you seek to save? A source of knowledgewith which you disagree? Yet you’re rather quick to steal my life.’‘A small sacrifice to save many. It is necessary.
Oliver Bowden
If you look deep enough into anything, sense is always there to be made, wouldn’t you agree?
Agostino Scafidi
Would a harsh word ever fall from lips which now breathed only love? Would the step whose lightest footfall now made her heart leap, ever sound in her ear like a death knell?
Fanny Fern
Denial is strong with this one.
Felicia Day
I couldn’t trust my own mind anymore, which wasthe scariest thing I’ve ever experienced.
Felicia Day
When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.
Herman Melville
When I write, I feel like an armless leg less man with a crayon in his mouth.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Just remember, we're all in this alone.
Lily Tomlin
Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings." Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world because "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,is not of the Father, but is of the world." This injunction is at best a paradox. Our humble and astonishing inheritance is the world and only the world, whose existence we constantly test (and prove) by telling ourselves stories about it. The suspicion that we and the world are made in the image of something wonderfully and chaotically coherent far beyond our grasp, of which we are also part; the hope that our exploded cosmos and we, its stardust, have an ineffable meaning and method; the delight in retelling the old metaphor of the world as a book we read and in which we too are read; the conceit that what we can know of reality is an imagination made of language — all this finds its material manifestation in that self-portrait we call a library. And our love for it, and our lust to see more of it, and our pride in its accomplishments as we wander through shelves full of books that promise more and more delights, are among our happiest, most moving proofs of possessing, in spite of all the miseries and sorrows of this life, a more intimate, consolatory, perhaps redeeming faith in a method behind the madness than any jealous deity could wish upon us.
Alberto Manguel
Get rich. Live life to the fullest. Destroy the world.
Andrew Durbin
Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work— What are these Martians? What are we? I answered, clearing my throat.
H.G.Wells
…Maybe I’ll be watching super-8 home videos,” Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. “I love my super-8 camera, it’s an Eastman Kodak one… Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome film and all kinds of traditional film products… it’s sad.” “Well, uh… well, have fun watching your home movies then,” Mandy finished, but she didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
Rebecca McNutt
You don't ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean. You enjoy it.
Joseph Campbell
How promising today's generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But I'd like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age.
Rebecca McNutt
In her eyes was the reflection of everything that mattered: old diners with neon signs, vinyl records, celluloid film, drive-in movies, Pears soap, department stores, her brother’s old blue Camaro car and the smell of coal dust in the rainy sky of a summer lightning storm.…And all the nice bright colors of the past that she thought were gone for good came flowing back into her life like a wave of nostalgia flooding over her, reds, yellows, blues and greens drenching her gray memories in psychedelic ribbons and glittering fireworks.…She hoped that the world would always hold those miniscule yet beautiful, deep and mysterious traces of memory.
Rebecca McNutt
Oh, I’m Chrissy Mackenzie, I’m from Vancouver but I came here to study environmental journalism,” the girl exclaimed with way too much enthusiasm. “You got any advice?”“Search me,” Mandy muttered, spooning another ice cube from the empty glass on the table in front of her. “I like pollution, I write in favor of it, and environmental journalism most often implies that it’s in favor of all that “go green” hippie crap.” “Oh, well….” Chrissy seemed taken aback, offended, and Mandy sighed a fourth time. “Damn it, I’m really sorry,” she apologized, smiling dismally at the aspiring writer. “It’s just been a really lousy day for me and I wasn’t really thinking. My advice? Find your own cause to represent, not one thrown out into society by a ton of environmentalist dopes. Find something new, something you think could be improved, and work from there.” Chrissy smiled with a look of total ecstasy as if the words of some nobody woman were important. Mandy momentarily noticed the groups of laughing, drunk, giggling people, all acting childish… and for a moment she wished she could be them.
Rebecca McNutt
Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When he’s done good and made things easy for everybody? That ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest……and he can’t believe in himself because the world’s whipped him so!
Lorraine Hansberry
I want to sleep. To find a safe place somewhere, and close my eyes, and rest, like an animal. That is what I am. An animal. Living from moment to moment, day to day, trying to make sense of the world in which I find myself.
S.J. Watson
I don’t want anything else bad to happen,” she whispered, her voice choked with tears. “I’m so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I’m guilty of so many things. I’m sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I’m sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world.”“I wasn’t alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do and that you were still alive, so I wasn’t really alone, I knew you were still there somewhere,” Alecto told her. His damaged smile and downcast, sorrowful eyes were draped in the shadow of the night, saving Mandy the trouble of seeing.
Rebecca McNutt
The world admires wealth and velocity—these are the things for which everyone strives. Railroads, the post, steamboats, and all possible modes of communication are the means by which the world overeducates itself and freezes itself in mediocrity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If I could, I would ask the world to make me skates so that I could find its frozen water and set myself free to smile, laugh, dance and cheer.I'd see the boundaries that would be in a world frozen in its place and they would keep me safe, away from where the waters warm, away from the stares, away from the thoughts that melt and tear.I would ask the world to skate with me, looking at the gladness I had found, knowing, really knowing, there was nothing left to fear.I think then we would be free to live life as we could, with more in common than apart, the fog would lift, the confusion would end and true understanding would hold us dear.
Liane Holliday Willey
This sense of insecurity was falling about the entire planet and though people went on doing the things they usually did, they had none of the assurance, the happy-go-lucky "all-right" feeling, that had hitherto sustained normal men. They went on doing their customary things because they could not think of anything else to do. They tried to believe, and many did succeed in believing, that there would presently be a turn for the better. They did nothing to bring about that turn for the better; they just hoped it would occur.
H.G.Wells
Tewler Americanus in particular was irritated by a harsh logic that overrode his dearest belief in his practical isolation, whenever he chose to withdraw himself, from the affairs of the rest of the world. He had escaped from the old world and he hated to feel that he was being drawn back to share a common destiny with the rest of mankind.
H.G.Wells
You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.
Herman Melville
Newspapers take peoples’ tragedies and force the world to experience all of it.
Rebecca McNutt
Dialogue helps us to acknowledge that we see the world not as it is, but as we are.
Oli Anderson
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughlyknown; we have only to follow the thread of the heropath. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, weshall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
Joseph Campbell
I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. 'I don't know', I said. 'Tomorrow.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I got a number of very thoughtful responses to the email I sent out last night, most of which I don’t have time to respond to right now. Thanks everyone for the encouragement, questions, criticism. Daniel’s response was particularly inspiring to me and deserves to be shared. The resistance of Israeli Jewish people to the occupation and the enormous risk taken by those refusing to serve in the Israeli military offers an example, especially for those of us living in the United States, of how to behave when you discover that atrocities are being commited in your name. Thank you.
Rachel Corrie