Quotation Saturday

WRITING

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
~ Ursula K. Le Guin

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
~ Ernest Hemingway

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”
~ Cornelia Funke

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
~Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

PAIN

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
~ Chuck Palahniuk

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bull. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.”
~ Jim Morrison

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
~ James Baldwin

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
~ C.S. Lewis

MUSIC

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
~ Bob Marley

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
~William Shakespeare

“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”
~ Albert Einstein

“Life, he realize, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.”
~ Nicholas Sparks

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination
and life to everything.”
~ Plato

REFLECTION

“Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours; whenever she was alone, she gave way to it as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant recollections.”
~ Jane Austen

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard

“Reflect upon your present blessings -- of which every man has many -- not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
~ Charles Dickens

“That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. “Real love, real friends, real body parts…”
~ Jess C. Scott