Anne > Anne's Quotes

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

“Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who's not invited to the party, they have to understand the reasons why.
... Every question, once it's formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“She was lonely. Who isn't lonely, I'd like to know? And that includes people who do have someone but just haven't noticed.”
― Magda Szabó, The Door

“Creativity requires a state of grace. So many things are required for it to succeed—stimulus and composure, inner peace and a kind of bitter-sweet excitement.”
― Magda Szabó, The Door

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“...it just goes to show you can't leave anything behind. You bring it all with you, whether you want to or not.”
― Stef Penney, The Tenderness of Wolves

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Millions saw the apple fall, Newton was the only one who asked why?”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Steve Jobs

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“Always trust strangers, it's the people you know that let you down.”
― Andrew O'Hagan