Life Quotes

If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death.

~ George Pelecanos

a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.

~ Tobias Wolff

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.

~ Nancy Horan

When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.

~ Hélène Cixous

I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his eyes wide open so that the sunlight might reach my heart despite all that darkness.

~ Ryan Adams

It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.

~ Neil Gaiman

I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

~ Beth Kephart

I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.

~ Pam Houston

Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time -- life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.

~ Holly Lisle

Life is a sea of vibrant color. Jump in.

~ A.d. Posey

lots of things happen in our lives without any apparent justification. but whatever happens to us,takes us one step ahead in the path of self realisation.The truth is we all are travellers in the life's eternal journey, to meet for a short while,to care and share but we tend to forget that nothing lasts forever.if only we could cultivate a sense of detachment,life would have been much easier.

~ Chitralekha Paul

Crazy by definition isKnowing that true sanity isA figment of the educated mind

~ Caleb Warta

Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft.

~ Roman Payne

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

~ George Orwell

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.

~ Salman Rushdie

My heart in passion, and my head on rhymes.

~ George Gordon Byron

Reading feeds the soul, writing nourishes it!

~ Joanne Mcclean

I don't write stories, I write characters.

~ Bhavya Kaushik

Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.

~ Cameron Conaway

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

~ Don Delillo

I don't write for a living. I live to write.

~ Marwa Ayad

And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumor beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease. (Oh God, oh God!) At last George Farr gave up trying to see her. He had 'phoned vainly and time after time, at last the telephone became the end in place of the means: he had forgotten why he wanted to reach her. Finally he told himself that he hated her, that he would go away; finally he was going to as much pains to avoid her as he had been to see her. So he slunk about the streets like a criminal, avoiding her, feeling his his very heart stop when he did occasionally see her unmistakable body from a distance. And at night he lay sleepless and writhing to think of her, then to rise and don a few garments and walk past her darkened house, gazing in slow misery at the room in which he knew she lay, soft and warm, in intimate slumber, then to return to home and bed to dream of her brokenly.

~ William Faulkner

All stories are love stories.

~ Robert Mcliam Wilson

Like forearm veins, my interests spread in different directions and eventually led to the hands, to writing.

~ Cameron Conaway

One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards.Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. In fact, I insist on it.A letter is like a poem, it leaps into life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer.

~ James Salter

No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.

~ Thomas Lux

I doubt I was much of a storyteller, but I would have put that smile in my book. On page 104, right next to the image of the Ward. I would have written it on my heart. I would have proofread it a thousand times under a thousand moons until a thousand tears thoroughly rationalized what it meant to me. Each time for when I’d met the darkness, and then succumbed. The smile read “you can’t break me’”—bold and in italics.

~ Nadège Richards

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

~ Neil Gaiman

Writing is like life: it goes on.

~ Marty Rubin

Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.

~ Mary Pipher

How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in the world, where I fit in the lives of the people dear to me?

~ Rabih Alameddine

Just start at the beginning, you say? And what beginning might that be? I've come to the conclusion all starts are false ones. Tap the fragile shell of any beginning and you'll find another nested inside.

~ Christina Sunley

Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane

~ Hope Edelman

The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.

~ William Saroyan

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences—nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.”At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.

~ Jonathan Lethem

The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.

~ Richard Rodríguez

Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.

~ Ray Bradbury

When a character comes to life, it’s like meeting a new friend for the first time.

~ Lynette Mather