Quotable Quotes

This is, in essence, a personal notebook written as a collection of quotations. They are thoughts and phrases that resonate with me as a writer, reader, and thinker. Welcome to my "writer's commonplace."


Featured Quote for October:
"October had tremendous possibility. The summers' oppressive heat was a distant memory, and the golden leaves promised a world full of beautiful adventures. They made me believe in miracles." Sarah Guillory, Reclaimed
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The following quotes can be found in my various postings. Click on the number proceeding the quote to read the blog post!
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16a) "In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play." —Friedrich Nietzsche

16b) "Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair." —Khalil Gibran

15a) "Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break." —William Shakespeare, Macbeth

15b) "Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell." —Edna St. Vincent Millay

14a) "I was the worst hitter ever. I never broke a bat until last year when I was backing out of the garage." —Lefty Gomez

14b) "The doctor must have put my pacemaker in wrong. Every time my husband kisses me, the garage door goes up." —Minnie Pearl

13a) "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'" —Eleanor Roosevelt
13a-1) "Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don't wait for something outside yourself to make you happy in the future. Think how really precious is the time you have to spend, whether it's at work or with your family. Every minute should be enjoyed and savored." —Earl Nightinggale 
13a-2) "I think it's important to get your surroundings as well as yourself into a positive state—meaning surround yourself with positive people, not the kind who are negative and jealous of everything you do." Heidi Klum 
13a-3) "A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading." —William Styron 
13a-4) "Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." Benjamin Franklin
13b) "It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things." —Leonardo da Vinci

12a) "I gotta be where I can see those Rocky Mountains, ride my horse, and watch an eagle fly." —Chris LeDoux

12b) "May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds." —Edward Abbey

11a) "Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one." —C.S. Lewis

11b) "I think if I've learned anything about friendship, it's to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don't walk away, don't be distracted, don't be too busy or tired, don't take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together. Powerful stuff." —John Katz

10a) "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." —James Baldwin

10b) "Sometimes we look for those thunderous things to happen in our life for our lives to change or go in the other direction. We seek the miracle. We seek the parting of the seas, the moving of the mountains. But no, it's a quiet thing. At least for me it was." —Ben Vereen

9a) "When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us." —Helen Keller

9b"Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so." —John Stewart Mill

8a) "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." —Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2

8b) "Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God." —Cornelia "Corrie" ten Boom

7a) "Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won't make it 'white'." ―Bing Crosby


7b) "The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum." ―Adlai E. Stevenson

6a) “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” ―Saint Augustine

6b) “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I shall die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take,
And this I ask for Jesus’ sake. Amen.”

5a) "I am not called to be successful, I am called to be faithful.” —Mother Teresa

5b) “Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.” —Simone Weil

4a) "A mentor is someone who sees more talent and ability within you than you see in yourself, and helps bring it out of you." —Bob Proctor

4b) “What I've found about it is that there are some folks you can talk to until you're blue in the face—they're never going to get it and they're never going to change. But every once in a while, you'll run into someone who is eager to listen, eager to learn, and willing to try new things….” ― Tyler Perry

3a) “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” ―Virginia Woolf

3b) “One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.” ―Antonio Porchia

2a) “The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.” ―Norbet Platt

2b) "And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." ―Sylvia Plath

1a) "Don't let ambition get so far ahead that it loses sight of the job at hand." ―William Feather

1b) “I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.” ―Charlotte Brontë


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These quotes aren't attached to any posts, but I believe they're still worth thinking about...
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"Almost everyone has problems and puts on a brave face – don’t presume they have it easy. You see of each person what they let you see." Benny Lewis [emphasis added]

"There are thousands and thousands of people out there living lives of quiet, screaming desperation who work long, hard hours, at jobs they hate, to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like." —Nigel Marsh
(See Nigel Marsh's entire talk at TEDxSydney from May 2010: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdpIKXLLYYM] )

"A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them." —John C. Maxwell

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." —C.G. Jung

"Let our New Year's resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word." —Goran Persson

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I love the rebelliousness of snail mail, and I love anything that can arrive with a postage stamp. There's something about that person's breath and hands on the letter." —Diane Lane

"We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindness there is at last one which makes the heart run over." ―Dr. Samuel Johnson

"There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies." ―Simone Weil

"Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time: effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end." ―Madame Germaine DeStael

"Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact." ―William James

"Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood." ―Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering." ―Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." ―Simone Weil

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity." ―Gilda Radner

"I don't belong to you. I belong to Christ. I'm his girl, and I'm a princess. So no matter what you say in all your anger and brokenness and rage, it's not mine to keep. It's not mine to carry. And I won't."  ―Gianna Jessen

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