#or

Oh, Eva." He rubbed his cheek against my damp face. "I must've wished for you so hard and so often you had no choice but to come true. ↗

— Sylvia Day

#gideon-cross #choice

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. ↗

— Guy Debord

#embraces #erases #expressions #false #his

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#erring #mistakes #progress #responsibility #progress

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation. ↗

— Alasdair Gray

#progress #work #progress

Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn't even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn't even know had a particular smell. ↗

— Emily Giffin

#attention

Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance. ↗

— Hendrik Willem Van Loon

#hendrick-van-loon #ignorance #society #willful-ignorance #education

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had." [Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#creativity #originality #point-of-view #uniqueness #writing

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. ↗

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

#deeds #graves #left #over #shed

I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#chaos #cooperation #organization #persuasion #pets

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#henry-james #john-irving #library #information