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“I know who we are, and how we got that way. We are writers. We danced with the words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.”
― Anna Quindlen

“Love so needs to love
that it will endure almost anything, even abuse,
just to flicker for a moment. But the sky's mouth is kind,
its song will never hurt you, for I
sing those words.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“I agree with yours of the 22d that a professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution. but we cannot always do what is absolutely best. those with whom we act, entertaining different views, have the power and the right of carrying them into practice. truth advances, & error recedes step by step only; and to do to our fellow-men the most good in our power, we must lead where we can, follow where we cannot, and still go with them, watching always the favorable moment for helping them to another step.

[Comment on establishing Jefferson's University of Virginia, a secular college, in a letter to Thomas Cooper 7 October 1814]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Study me as much as you like, you will not know me, for I differ in a hundred ways from what you see me to be. Put yourself behind my eyes and see me as I see myself, for I have chosen to dwell in a place you cannot see.”
― Rumi

“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“A short story is a different thing altogether �� a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Think how you love me,' she whispered. 'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.'

You'll always be like this to me.'

Oh no; but promise me you'll remember.' Her tears were falling. 'I'll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Magnetism

“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.”
― Mary Oliver

“Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.”
― Anna Quindlen, Every Last One

“It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses, and apologized to no one.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“maybe death
isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us--”
― Mary Oliver, Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”
― E.B. White

“Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be. I don't want anyone I know to take that terrible chance. And the only way to avoid it is to listen to that small voice inside you that tells you to make mischief, to have fun, to be contrarian, to go another way. George Eliot wrote, 'It is never too late to be what you might have been.' It is never too early, either.”
― Anna Quindlen, Being Perfect

“A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them”
― Mary Oliver

“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”
― Anna Quindlen, Living Out Loud

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us...”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2

“Also I wanted to be able to love
And we all know how that one goes, don't we?
Slowly”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.”
― Anna Quindlen

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.”
― Mary Oliver, Dream Work

“I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as they're not too terrible--well, even perhaps the truly terrible ones--and will reread something she's already read, even if it's something like a detective novel, when you'd suspect that knowing who had really killed the countess would materially detract from the experience. (It doesn't, and besides, I often can't remember who the murderer was in the first place.)”
― Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.”
― Mary Oliver White Heron Rises Over Blackwater

“For the young the days go fast and the years go slow; for the old the days go slow and the years go fast.”
― Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I Go Down To The Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall��
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems

“People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.”
― Anna Quindlin