“How the hell do you sum up your sister in three minutes? She's your twin and your polar opposite. She's your constant companion and your competition. She's your best friend and the biggest bitch in the world. She's everything you wish you could be and everything you wish you weren't.”
― M. Molly Backes, quote from The Princesses of Iowa
“I've never felt a connection like this with anyone else... I don't even know how to explain it. I feel like I already knew you before I met you, and the first time I saw you, the first time I talked to you, was incidental, because the connection was already there --.”
― M. Molly Backes, quote from The Princesses of Iowa
“None of us is delicate enough to touch anyone else without hurting them a little bit.”
― M. Molly Backes, quote from The Princesses of Iowa
“If you are here because you think writing will always be fun, you're in for a disappointment. Writing -- real writing -- is among the most difficult work you will ever face in your life. The irony is that the harder you work at it, the harder it gets.”
― M. Molly Backes, quote from The Princesses of Iowa
“If you're not scared when you are writing you're not working hard enough. You'll be afraid but you have to keep going.”
― M. Molly Backes, quote from The Princesses of Iowa
“It's your writing you guys. Follow it wherever it takes you. All you need to do is tell your truth.”
― M. Molly Backes, quote from The Princesses of Iowa
“The point of freewriting is to get past the voice inside your head that tells you your ideas aren't good enough, your words aren't good enough, you're no writer and so forth.”
― M. Molly Backes, quote from The Princesses of Iowa
M. Molly Backes
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“And I told him, if I am so hard to love, then let me run wild.
My love is not a testament to my surrender. I will show you just how much I love you, with the inward draw of every breath—the collective sigh of the world and all its despair. But I will never give you what you want in chains.”
― Lang Leav, quote from The Universe of Us
“Nothing in the world has tentacles or fins or paws or claws. Nothing in the world soars. Nothing swims. Nothing purrs, barks, growls, roars, chitters, trills, or cries repeatedly two notes, a descending fourth, for three months of the year. There are no months of the year. There is no moon. There is no year.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“John felt grounded again. He remembered his favorite Bible story, the one about Peter getting out of the boat and walking on water. The big fisherman was walking along quite nicely until he looked at the waves and began to sink. As much as possible, John tried to live his life without looking at the waves. But when he did, when the lives of his grown children caused his faith to waver even a little, God always sent someone to illustrate the words of Christ: “You of little faith . . . why did you doubt?” John felt certain that in this, his most trying season yet, the Lord had sent Pastor Mark to fill that role. It was a certainty that kept his eyes where they belonged—off the waves and straight ahead to the outstretched arms of Jesus.”
― Karen Kingsbury, quote from Redemption
“In earlier times, one had an easier conscience about being a person than one does today. People were like cornstalks in a field, probably more violently tossed back and forth by God, hail, fire, pestilence, and war than they are today, but as a whole, as a city, a region, a field, and as to what personal movement was left to the individual stalk – all this was clearly defined and could be answered for. But today responsibility’s center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances. Have we not noticed that experiences have made themselves independent of people? They have gone on the stage, into books, into the reports of research institutes and explorers, into ideological or religious communities, which foster certain kinds of experience at the expense of others as if they are conducting a kind of social experiment, and insofar as experiences are not actually being developed, they are simply left dangling in the air. Who can say nowadays that his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know more about it than he does? A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings. Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the “I” itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naïve. There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say “We saw the So-and-sos yesterday” or “We’ll do this or that today” and enjoy it without its needing to have any content of significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why.
And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Man Without Qualities: Vol. 1
“Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise.”
― John Stuart Mill, quote from Utilitarianism
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Seeing and Savoring...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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