Quote Archive

“it is terrifying how people can misjudge each other.  Even more terrifying to think that an initial judgment was correct and that it is possible for some one to become utterly unrecognizably changed.”
Alice Hoffman, Illumination Night“The past could press down on you until every bit of air was forced out of your lungs; if you weren’t careful, it could swallow you up entriely, leaving nothing but a few fragile bones, a silver bracelt, ten moon-shaped fingernails.”

“It was a heartbreaking scent, one that left you longing for everything you once had and lost.”

-Alice Hoffman, Fortune’s Daughter

“In the end, perhaps he was who he was regardless of any other possibility.  John carried his mistakes with him until he eas nearly too weighed down to remember what might have been.”

-Alice Hoffman, Skylight Confessions

“Divorce is a series of internal earthquakes, that’s what it is, one after the other.”

“This is my new life: I push pain away all day, and the moment I put my arms down it walks into me and has a seat.”

-Elizabeth Berg, Open House

“It is astounding to consider how many loses a single individual can sustain.”

“The way he wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.  The way he seemed to fold up inside himself, going farther and farther inside, until the part of him having dinner at their table was only the smallest corner of his soul.”

-Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths, those myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses,who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened when a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen. Or a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows passes over your hand, and over all you do. You must think that life has not forgotten you. That it holds you in its hands. It will not let you fall.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Every now & then when your life gets complicated & the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals & then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun. Just roll the roof back & screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter & move out with the music at top volume, & at least a pint of ether.

- Hunter S. Thompson,Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas

We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself. Sometimes we see the way out but wander further and deeper despite ourselves; the fear, the anger or the sadness preventing us returning. Sometimes we prefer to be lost and wandering, sometimes it’s easier. Sometimes we find our own way out. But regardless, always, we are found.

- Cecelia Ahern, A Place Called Here

“I learned there are troubles
Of more than one kind.
Some come from ahead
And some come from behind.

But I’ve bought a big bat.
I’m all ready, you see.
Now my troubles are going
To have trouble with ME!”

- Dr. Seuss, “I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew”

I promise I will be good and true, that I will never sigh again and if I must, only when it is a sigh of great joy and fullness and content. I will draw you a picture of the inside of me. Because the words I need just haven’t been thought of yet. I won’t say those things that I have before. I want to be good to you. Can you possibly promise me that you will look at me like I am the first flower of spring, like I am a line you just read that knocked you down and you have to repeat it over to make sure you just read me correctly? And tell me that no one else can knock you down that way? That I will wake up and you will still be there. It isn’t all madness and I’m just a girl with too many thoughts in her brain. So many firsts with you, I refuse to have any lasts.

-Unknown

Love is the only flower that grows and blossoms without the aid of the seasons.

- Kahlil Gibran

Relationships don’t work they way they do on television and in the movies. Will they? Won’t they? And then they finally do, and they’re happy forever. Gimme a break. Nine out of ten of them end because they weren’t right for each other to begin with, and half of the ones who get married get divorced anyway, and I’m telling you right now, through all this stuff I have not become a cynic. I haven’t. Yes, I do happen to believe that love is mainly about pushing chocolate covered candies and, y’know, in some cultures, a chicken. You can call me a sucker, I don’t care, because I do believe in it. Bottom line: it’s couples who are truly right for each other wade through the same crap as everybody else, but the big difference is they don’t let it take them down. One of those two people will stand up and fight for that relationship every time. If it’s right, and they’re real lucky, one of them will say something.

- Dr Cox

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

- C.S. Lewis

You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.

- Dr. Seuss

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: ‘House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day’.

- Neil Gaiman

Sometimes between people it takes a long time to get over the disappointment they cause each other.

- Jan M. Czech

This time I refuse to wake up until my head, my heart, and my life have all returned to normal.

- Jane Green

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

- Marcus Aurelius

Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.

- Neil Gaiman

There’s no expanse big enough for my hurt,I weep for my misfortune and yours together and I feel your death more than I do my life

- Elegy, Miguel Hernandez

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

- Eleanor Roosevelt

It’s often just enough to be with someone. I don’t need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You’re not alone.

- Marylin Monroe

The great thing about suicide is that it’s not one of those things you have to do now or you lose your chance. I mean, you can always do it later.

-Harvey Fierstein

There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.
- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.

— Neil Gaiman

perhaps there’s a way to reprogram my goals

and capture the me that was me

- Greg Asimakoupoulos

When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.

— Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions)

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there.

- Margaret Atwood

Ever so faintly, words around the smoke trail read, “I am weak because I have loved you.”

-Eveline Tarunadjaja

I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.

— Neil Gaiman

A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work.

-Geoffrey Norman

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

- GK Chesterton

Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

— Neil Gaiman

I know what it’s like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can’t. How you hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.

- from Girl, Interrupted

Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

— Neil Gaiman

Some people never go crazy. What terribly boring lives they must lead.

- Charles Bukowski

You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

-C. S. Lewis

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

— Neil Gaiman

Perhaps I did fall in love with Jonathan because he set me free. But I believe we all fall in love for some esoteric and simple reason: the first time a man comes to your rescue, the way he holds you when you kiss, his smile that haunts you and has you endlessly daydreaming. I’m not sure the reason you fall is as important as the fact that you have indeed fallen. At least that’s what I tell myself when I fantasize about a life I will never have with a man I will never truly know.

- David Cristofano, The Girl She Used to Be

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.

— Neil Gaiman

I know I am but summer to your heart,

And not the full four seasons of the year

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

- Jonathan Safran Foer

We said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they said once, but we reversed that, and love, like Heaven, was always around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

- Margaret Atwood

What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore it knows it’s not fooling a soul.

— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

I had to learn the hard way that some people walk into our lives and physically walk out… but they never really leave.

- Arminda Meer

You get what anybody gets – you get a lifetime.

— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes)

I lock my door upon myself

And bar them out; but who shall wall

Self from myself, most loathed of all?

-Christina Rosetti

Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.

— Neil Gaiman

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don’t say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.

-Anaïs Nin

The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind.

-Eric Hoffer

The road from intensity to greatness passes through sacrifice.

-Kassner

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t to forget make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

— Neil Gaiman

Never give in–never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

-Sir Winston Churchill

People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.

— Neil Gaiman

We are remembered for the totality of our accomplishments, but we are defined by the singularity of our greatest failure.  It does not matter what you have been right about, and it does not matter how often that rightness is validated by others.  We are what we cannot do.

- Chuck Klosterman

Be to her virtues very kind,

Be to her faults a little blind.

— Neil Gaiman (The Absolute Sandman)

I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved.

- George Eliot

Love is too strong a word to say early, but it has a beautiful meaning to say it too late.

- Kurt Cornsh

Find the person who will love you because of your differences and not in spite of them and you have found a lover for life.

- Leo Buscaglia

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.

- Agnes Nepplier

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.

— Neil Gaiman

There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. it is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live…..the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: wait and hope.

- Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

- Jaques Lacan

Most people don’t realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn’t value its librarians doesn’t value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?

— Neil Gaiman

I am complete. I am a complete fabrication.

- David Cristofano, The Girl She Used to Be

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

— Neil Gaiman

Things will go where they’re supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Depsite your best efforts, people are going to get hurt. Life is like that.

- Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

— Neil Gaiman

“I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.”

“Waiting for perfect love?”

“No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, I say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortbread. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortbread out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for”.

“I’m not sure that has anything to do with love”, I said with some amazement.

“It does”, she said. “You just don’t know it. There are times in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important”.

- Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn’t occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

— Neil Gaiman

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

- Flora Ephron

Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.

— Neil Gaiman

Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream world into reality.

- Theodor Rek

Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that

witches are often betrayed by their appetites;

dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always;

hearts can be well-hidden,

and you can betray them with your tongue.

— Neil Gaiman

I am one of the invisible living among the notable. Day after day I hear doors shut, stumble over slurs and bump into the man who nods yes, but isn’t listening.

- Renato Rosaldo

I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.

— Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere)

The first duty of love is to listen.

- Paul Tillich

Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp; it needs to be fed out of the oil of another’s heart, or its flame burns low.

- Henry Ward Beecher

Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.

— Neil Gaiman

If something anticipated arrives too late it finds us numb, wrung out from waiting, and we feel – nothing at all. The best things arrive on time.

- Dorothy Gilman

She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.

— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

I hate when relationships change people, but it happens… sometimes for good and sometimes for bad, but when two people fall in love and are still the same people, that’s true love. In my humble opinion.

- Jackson Rathbone

I will act now. I will act now. I will act now. Henceforth, I will repeat these words each hour, each day, everyday, until the words become as much a habit as my breathing, and the action which follows becomes as instinctive as the blinking of my eyelids. With these words I can condition my mind to perform every action necessary for my success. I will act now. I will repeat these words again and again and again. I will walk where failures fear to walk. I will work when failures seek rest. I will act now for now is all I have. Tomorrow is the day reserved for the labor of the lazy. I am not lazy. Tomorrow is the day when the failure will succeed. I am not a failure. I will act now. Success will not wait. If I delay, success will become wed to another and lost to me forever. This is the time. This is the place. I am the person.

-Og Mandino

The loving are the daring.

- Bayard Taylor

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

— Neil Gaiman

In life you need either inspiration or desperation.

- Tony Robbins

Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Expect us when you see us.

— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.

— Neil Gaiman

While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many–the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, the profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It’s difficult to define, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can’t prove it.

-David Buss, psychologist, University of Texas, Austin; author of The Evolution of Desire ,The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006

Stick and stones may break your bones and everything after that is irrelevant.

- David Cristofano, The Girl She Used to Be

“I am the most miserable person who ever lived,” he said…. “You are young, and in love,” said Primus. “Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.”

— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

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

There are only two worlds – your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.

— Neil Gaiman (The Books of Magic)

Our revenge is to live. We may be hunted like animals but we will not become animals. We have all chosen this – to live free, like human beings, for as long as we can. Each day of freedom is a victory. And if we die trying to live, at least we die like human beings.

-Tuvia

To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. To say that I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to.

- Garth Stein

When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn’t make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. “It’s all right” we whisper, “I’m here, I love you.” and we lie: “I’ll never leave you.” For just a moment or two the darkness doesn’t seem so bad.

— Neil Gaiman

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

- Margaret Atwood