~Jonathan Safran Foer from EATING ANIMALS

"'If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.'"

~Michael Dorris from SEES BEHIND TREES

"'Every day can't be unusual,' my father said gently. 'Otherwise something wonderful wouldn't mean so much when it happened.'"

~Johnny Depp

"The scariest enemy is within, allowing yourself to conform to what is expected of you."

~Michael Dorris from SEES BEHIND TREES

"Sometimes a certain type of silence makes a noise. It gets deeper, more still, makes a hole within the bigger quiet."

~NIKO STUMPO

"Art has never been made while thinking of art."

~Natalie Portman from INTERVIEW magazine, Sept. 2009

"... I am far from fearless. I'm afraid of everything. But maybe when you're afraid of everything, it sort of seems like you're scared of nothing."

~ Douglas Adams from THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

~Rod Serling from Twilight Zone's "MONSTERS ARE DUE ON MAPLE STREET"

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices. To be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the frightened, thoughtless search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own: for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things can not be confined to the Twilight Zone."

~ Suzanne Collins from CATCHING FIRE

"sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them."

~ Suzanne Collins from CATCHING FIRE

"You haven't hurt people -- you've given them an opportunity. They just have to be brave enough to take it."

~Jeffrey Eugenides from THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do no hear us . . . calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."

~Jeffrey Eugenides from THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

"'We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it -- that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.'"

~Jeffrey Eugenides from THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

"'These trees are ancient. They have evolutionary strategies to deal with beetles. Why don't you just leave it up to nature?' / 'If we left it up to nature, there'd be no trees left.' / 'That's what it's going to be like anyway.'"

~Tim O'Brien from THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

"The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat."

~Tim O'Brien from THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

"War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. war is nasty; war is fun. war is thrilling; war is drudgery. war makes you a man; war makes you dead."

~Tim O'Brien from THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

"... the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. you pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents taht did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

~Captain Peleg from Herman Melville’s MOLBY-DICK

“Can’t ye see the world from where you stand?”

~Tim O'Brien from THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

"Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."

~Kurt Vonnegut

"Be careful who you pretend to be, because you are who you pretend to be."

~Jorge Luis Borges from the short story “The Library of Babel”

"This philosopher observed that all books, however different from one another they might be, consist of identical elements: the space, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet."

~Ruldolfo Anaya BLESS ME, ULTIMA

“’Be prepared to see things changed when you return –‘ . . .
‘You are growing, and growth is change. Accept the change, make it a part of your strength –‘”

~Markus Zusak from THE BOOK THIEF

"'I'm an idiot.'
No, Papa.
You're just a man."

~Scott Adams

"Frankly, I'm suspicious of anyone who has a strong opinion on a complicated issue."

~Markus Zusak from THE BOOK THIEF

"'What someone says and what happened are usually two different things, Rudy, especially when it comes to you.'"

~Jamake Highwater from ANPAO

“’Really?' the Sorcerers mocked. 'Don’t you know that everything is real?'”

~Neil Gaiman from THE GRAVEYARD BOOK

“”You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you’re dead, it’s gone. Over. You’ve made what you’ve made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.”

~Stephenie Meyer from "Eclipse"

"The right thing isn't always real obvious. Sometimes the right thing for one person is the wrong thing for someone else. So . . . good luck figuring that out."

~Daniel Defoe from ROBINSON CRUSOE

"I had more care upon my head now than I had in my silent state of life in the island, where I wanted nothing but what I had, and had nothing but what I wanted."

~Jorge Luis Borges from the short story "BRODIE'S REPORT"

"Philosophically speaking, memory is no less marvelous than prophesying the future; tomorrow is closer to us than the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews, which, nonetheless, we remember."

~Elbert Hubbard

"The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge."

~We Wrote the Book on Connectors album TURBO HORSE

"Grandma's aren't always this sexy, you know."

~Naomi Shihab Nye from WHAT HAVE YOU LOST?

"The things that cause you friction are the things from which you might make art."

~Jorge Luis Borges from the short story THE ZAHIR

". . . there is nothing less material than money, since any coin . . . is, in all truth, a panoply of possible futures. Money is abstract, I said over and over, money is future time."

~Samuel Johnson

“Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent.”

~ Jean-Paul Sarte from the play NO EXIT

“One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are – your life, and nothing else.”

~ Neil Gaiman from THE SANDMAN, VOL VI: FABLES & REFLECTIONS

"You shouldn't trust the storyteller; only trust the story."

~ Neil Gaiman from THE SANDMAN, VOL VI: FABLES & REFLECTIONS

"Value's in what people think. not in what's real. Value's in dreams, boy."

~Epictetus

“Only the educated are free.”

~ Robert M. Persig from ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE

“This is how it was before they white man came – beautiful lava flows, and scrawny trees and not a beer can anywhere – but now that the white man is here, it looks fake. Maybe the National Park Service should set just one pile of beer cans in the middle of all that lava and then it would come to life. The absence of beer cans is distracting.”

~Gloria Steinem

"Empathy is the most radical of human emotions."

~ Jorge Luis Borges from COLLECTED FICTIONS "Preface to the First Edition”

"I sometimes think that good readers are poets as singular, and as awesome, as great authors themselves."

~Ruldolfo Anaya from BLESS ME, ULTIMA

“’Understanding comes with life, . . . as a man grows he sees life and death, he is happy and sad, he works, plays, meets people – sometimes it takes a lifetime to acquire understanding, because in the end understanding simply means having a sympathy for people.’”

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~ Nathaniel Pitt Langford from THE DISCOVERT OF YELLOWSTONE PARK

"Truly has it been said, that we live to learn how little may be known, and of what we see, how much surpasses comprehension."

~M.T. Anderson from THE ASTONISHING LIFE OF OCTAVIAN NOTHING TRAITOR TO THE NATION, VOLUME ONE: THE POX PARTY

“There is no refreshment more gratifying to the soul than the sight of Nature in her summer finery, before the heat is at its most intense. She is soothing, but not soporific; intoxicating without inebriation.”

~Alan Moore from V FOR VENDETTA

Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.

~William Dement, sleep expert, quoted in Salon.com

“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.”

~ Marjane Satrapi from PERSEPOLIS 2: THE STORY OF A RETURN

“When we’re afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators’ repression.”

~Neil Gaiman THE GRAVEYARD BOOK

"People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer."

~Matthew Arnold

"The free thinking of one age is the common sense of the next."

~ Aristotle

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

A Beginning

Ah, to begin a blog, to post to you all, to the world....

I've always loved collecting quotes, but never had a place for them, so here they are. I'll begin by adding the ones I've collected over the years, and I'll slowly add new ones in as I read them. Most will come from books I read, and I'll should have attribution. Please enjoy!