"Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion."
- (G.W.F. Hegel)
//
"Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that." He takes another sip of his wine. "There are many kinds of magic, after all."
- (The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, pg. 381)
//
"Why would you save me?" Despereaux asked. "Have you saved any of the other mice?"
"Never," said Gregory, "not one."
"Why would you save me, then?"
"Because you, mouse, can tell Gregory a story. Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light."
- (The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo, pg. 79, 81)
//
"Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
- (G.K. Chesterton)
//
"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to slap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop."
- (Vita Sackville-West)
//
" 'It's genius simmering, perhaps. I'll let it simmer, and see what comes of it,' he said, with a secret suspicion all the while that it wasn't genius, but something far more common."
- (Laurie, writing a play that keeps coming back to Amy, Little Women, page 392)
//
"Anyone who says they only have one life to live must not know how to read a book."
- (Anon)
//
"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."
- (Anais Nin)
//
"She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing 'yes' into the sky."
- (Anon)
