Opening Gambits

Sarah Kane

2011-05-19T20:43:00.001+02:00

'And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy's and talk about the day and type your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don't listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you're sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the the programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you're late and be amazed when you're early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I'm black and be sorry when I'm wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I'd known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin and get scared when you're angry and your eye has gone red and the other eye blue and your hair to the left and your face oriental and tell you you're gorgeous and hug you when you're anxious and hold you when you hurt and want you when I smell you and offend you when I touch you and whimper when I'm next to you and whimper when I'm not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night and get cold when you take the blanket and hot when you don't and melt when you smile and dissolve when you laugh and not understand why you think I'm rejecting you when I'm not rejecting you and wonder how you could think I'd ever reject you and wonder who you are but accept you anyway and tell you about the tree angel enchanted forest boy who flew across the ocean because he loved you and write poems for you and wonder why you don't believe me and have a feeling so deep I can't find words for it and want to buy you a kitten I'd get jealous of because it would get more attention than me and keep you in bed when you have to go and cry like a baby when you finally do and get rid of the roaches and buy you presents you don't want and take them away again and ask you to marry me and you say no again but keep on asking because though you think I don't mean it I do always have from the first time I asked you and wander the city thinking it's empty without you and want want you want and think I'm losing myself but know I'm safe with you and tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me because you don't deserve any less and answer your questions when I'd rather not and tell you the truth when I really dont' want to and try to be honest because I know you prefer it and think it's all over but hang on in for just ten more minutes before you throw me out of your life and forget who I am and try to get closer to you because it's a beautiful learning to know you and well worth the effort and speak German to you badly and Hebrew to you worse and make love with you at three in the morning and somehow somehow somehow communicate some of the overwhelming undying overpowering unconditional all-encompassing heart-enriching mind-expanding on-going never-ending love I have for you ... '

Sarah Kane

Julie Buxbaum - The Opposite of Love

2011-05-19T20:41:00.000+02:00

"I miss the way he used to kiss my shoulder whenever it was bare and he was nearby. I miss how he cleared his throat before he took a sip of water and scratched his left arm with his right hand when he was nervous. I miss how he tucked my hair behind my ear when it came loose and took my temperature when I was sick or when he was bored. I miss his glasses on my nightstand. I miss watching him take Sunday afternoon naps on my couch, with the newspaper resting on his stomach like a blanket. How his hands stayed clasped, fingers intertwined, while he slept. I miss the cadence of his speech and the stupidity of his puns. I miss playing doctor when we made love, and even when we didn't. I miss his smell, like fresh laundry and honey (because of his shampoo) at his place. Fresh laundry and coconut (because of my shampoo) at mine. I miss that he used to force me to listen to French rap and would sing along in a horrible accent. I miss that he always said "I love you" when he hung up the phone with his sister, never shy or embarassed, regardless of who else was around. I miss that his ideal Friday night included a DVD, eating Chinese food right out of the carton, and cuddling on top of my duvet cover. I miss that he reread books from his childhood and then from mine. I miss that he was the only man that I have ever farted on, and with, freely. I miss that he understood that the holidays were hard for me and that he wanted me to never feel lonely."

Julie Buxbaum - The Opposite of Love

Stephen King

2011-03-19T11:19:00.001+02:00

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear."

Stephen King (Different Seasons)

Audre Lorde

2011-03-19T11:17:00.000+02:00

"I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."

I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking."

Audre Lorde

Rick Bass

2011-03-19T11:16:00.000+02:00

"If it's wild to your own heart, protect it. Preserve it. Love it. And fight for it, and dedicate yourself to it, whether it's a mountain range, your wife, your husband, or even your job. It doesn't matter if it's wild to anyone else: if it's what makes your heart sing, if it's what makes your days soar like a hawk in the summertime, then focus on it. Because for sure, it's wild, and if it's wild, it'll mean you're still free. No matter where you are.

Rick Bass

Steve Harvey

2011-03-19T11:15:00.001+02:00

"All you have to do is speak up. Tell him straight up: "I need you here to protect and provide for us, to give us security in our lives, to help raise these children, to set an example for this boy, who needs to see what real men do, and for this girl, who needs to know what a real man is so she can find one of her own someday. I need you to be the head of this family." - Lay it out like this, and your requirements will trump his mother's every time."

Steve Harvey (Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment)

Ana Castillo (I Ask the Impossible: Poems)

2011-03-19T11:13:00.002+02:00

"I ask the impossible: love me forever.
Love me when all desire is gone.
Love me with the single mindedness of a monk.
When the world in its entirety,
and all that you hold sacred advise you
against it: love me still more.
When rage fills you and has no name: love me.
When each step from your door to our job tires you--
love me; and from job to home again, love me, love me.
Love me when you're bored--
when every woman you see is more beautiful than the last,
or more pathetic, love me as you always have:
not as admirer or judge, but with
the compassion you save for yourself
in your solitude.
Love me as you relish your loneliness,
the anticipation of your death,
mysteries of the flesh, as it tears and mends.
Love me as your most treasured childhood memory--
and if there is none to recall--
imagine one, place me there with you.
Love me withered as you loved me new.
Love me as if I were forever--
and I, will make the impossible
a simple act,
by loving you, loving you as I do"

Ana Castillo (I Ask the Impossible: Poems)

2011-02-12T22:12:00.001+02:00

You can now follow Opening Gambits on Facebook.

Eleanor Roosevelt

2011-02-12T21:53:00.000+02:00

"Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: "No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall."

Eleanor Roosevelt

Stephanie Meyer

2011-02-12T21:52:00.002+02:00

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you"

Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

John Barrowman

2011-02-12T21:52:00.001+02:00

"Yet if I was asked to do this again - in fact, if I was ever asked to repeat any of my experiences - I'd have to say, fuck it, bring them on. I've no regrets. This is what it means to be alive."

John Barrowman

David Levithan

2011-02-12T21:50:00.000+02:00

"It doesn't have to be on Valentine's Day. It doesn't have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn't have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn't have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third date. It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirit. It just has to be."

David Levithan

Charles Frazier

2011-02-12T21:49:00.001+02:00

"She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred."

Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain)

Chris Rose

2011-02-12T21:48:00.000+02:00

"Do what you do. This Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year's Eve, Twelfth Night, Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras, St. Paddy's Day, and every day henceforth. Just do what you do. Live out your life and your traditions on your own terms. If it offends others, so be it. That's their problem."

Chris Rose

Edmond De Goncourt

2011-02-12T21:47:00.000+02:00

"Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence."

Edmond De Goncourt

C.S. Lewis

2010-12-26T22:22:00.001+02:00

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."

C.S. Lewis (The World's Last Night: And Other Essays)

Eleanor Roosevelt

2010-12-26T22:20:00.000+02:00

"We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all."

Eleanor Roosevelt

Jonathan Hull

2010-10-16T21:44:00.000+02:00

‎"It is said that life is too short, and that’s quite true, unless you are lonely. Loneliness can bring time to its knees; an absolute and utter standstill."

Jonathan Hull (Losing Julia)

Stephen King

2010-10-16T21:43:00.000+02:00

"Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing."

Stephen King (Lisey's Story)

ML King

2010-10-10T21:13:00.000+02:00

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy...'

ML King

Leo Rosten

2010-10-10T21:11:00.000+02:00

"Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind."

Leo Rosten

Bob Marley

2010-10-10T21:10:00.000+02:00

You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She's not perfect - you aren't either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break - her heart. So don't hurt her, don't change her, don't analyze and don't expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she's not there."

Bob Marley

Haruki Murakami

2010-10-10T21:09:00.000+02:00

But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."

Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

Lemony Snicket

2010-10-10T21:06:00.001+02:00

"When someone is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them."

Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

George Gordon Byron

2010-10-10T21:05:00.002+02:00

"In secret we met - in silence I grieve. That thy heart could forget, thy spirit deceive. If I should meet thee after long years, how should I greet thee? With silence and tears ... "

George Gordon Byron

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2010-09-17T21:26:00.001+02:00

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Megan McCafferty

2010-09-17T21:24:00.000+02:00

"Loving you has never been the problem. What's troubling me is how loving you may never be enough."

Megan McCafferty (Fourth Comings)

Janet Fitch

2010-09-17T21:23:00.001+02:00

"You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought me from there to here. Should I regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if I could uncouple them? Do I regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you could begin to imagine."

Janet Fitch

Brian Andreas

2010-09-05T18:57:00.000+02:00

"I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you lie close against me while you sleep. There are no words for that."

Brian Andreas (Story People)

Lewis Carroll

2010-09-05T18:55:00.002+02:00

"I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again."

Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass)

George Carlin

2010-09-05T18:54:00.002+02:00

‎"I don't have pet peeves - I have major psychotic fucking hatreds." - George Carlin

Dean Koontz

2010-09-05T18:51:00.001+02:00

"God is never cruel. There is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we did not, we would have no compassion for others, would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one."

Dean Koontz

The language of love

2010-07-20T17:58:00.000+02:00

Caramel skin.
Devour him with your eyes;
drink in the sight of him.
Swallow him whole.

(c) 2008 all rights reserved.

Kirsten Dewar

2010-07-20T17:56:00.000+02:00

Words. Roll them on your tongue. Swirl them around your mouth. Breathe them in. Taste them: the rich vibrant golds and greens, the colours of jealousy and fealty; the yellows, friendship distilled, bottled sunshine; the seething, vengeful reds; passionate plum; the shy and retiring grays. Pause. Close your eyes. Study the pictures on the inside of your lids. Look at them closely. Do they whisper, and nudge and call out to be spoken? Consider their sound. Tease out each each syllable. Do the nerves grate? Can you feel the muscles in your back tense? Check your hands. Are they cold and clammy? Hot and sudoriferous? Are your palms open wide, or fisted balls? Would these words tease, tempt, tantalise, sending a frisson of what could only be sheer delight down the receiver’s spine? Or are they sharp, jagged, meant to hurt and harm? Are they royal orchid, or common garden variety? Were they nurtured in love, or deceit? Can they, should they live an existence independent of their speaker? Remember: words once spoken, cannot be recalled. Finally, having considered all these things, exhale: breath them into life. Speak. Give them voice.

(c) 2008 all rights reserved.

Kirsten Dewar

2010-07-20T17:54:00.001+02:00

The inspiration for this poem was a seed pod I found while wondering around in Kirstenbosch Gardens last winter. To me it looked exactly like a little hedgehog - and the inspiration kind of flowed from there.

Farthing Wood

Quilled hirsuteness,
hard, spiky, brown.
Solitary, nocturnal, pin cushion
barbed, bristling ball at sudden sound.

Hedge-grown, cartilaginous rodent,
bashful, and bowed:
soft, silken centre,
Nature’s mohawk, avowed!

[c]2008, all rights reserved.

Gordon B. Hinckley

2010-07-03T20:10:00.001+02:00

"Love is the very essence of life. It is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet it is not found only there. Love is at the beginning also, and from it springs the beauty that arches across the sky on a stormy day. Love is the security for which children weep, the yearning of youth, the adhesive that binds marriage, the peace of old age, the sunlight of hope .. "

Gordon B. Hinckley

Max Lucado

2010-07-03T20:08:00.001+02:00

"Flirt. Giggle. Dip your cookies in your milk. Take a nap. Say you're sorry if you hurt someone. Chase a butterfly. Be a child again."

Max Lucado

2010-07-03T20:06:00.001+02:00

"This is just who I am to other people. And you became other people ... "
#Iwrotethisforyou #randomthoughts

Libba Bray

2010-07-03T20:05:00.001+02:00

"We all do things we desperately wish we could undo. Those regrets just become part of who we are, along with everything else. To spend time trying to change that, well, it's like chasing clouds."

Libba Bray

Mary Anne Radmacher

2010-07-03T20:04:00.001+02:00

"Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Appreciate your friends. Continue to learn. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is."

Mary Anne Radmacher

Jeanette Winterson

2010-07-03T20:02:00.000+02:00

"Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour."

Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

Doris Lessing

2010-07-03T20:01:00.000+02:00

"I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some years later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have."

Doris Lessing

Susanna Clarke

2010-07-03T20:00:00.000+02:00

"After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Peroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of colour blue."

Susanna Clarke

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

2010-06-20T18:02:00.000+02:00

"Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return."

Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

Frances Hodgson Burnett

2010-06-20T18:01:00.001+02:00

"I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics. Even if they dress in rags, even if they aren't pretty, or smart, or young. They're still princesses. All of us. Didn't your father ever tell you that? Didn't he?"

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Lisa Lutz

2010-06-20T18:00:00.000+02:00

"My father insisted that the boys in my life were directly responsible for my juvenile-delinquent tendencies. My mother, more accurately, assumed that I was the bad influence."

Lisa Lutz (The Spellman Files)

ML King

2010-06-18T20:20:00.000+02:00

'The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy...'

ML King

Libba Bray

2010-06-18T20:18:00.002+02:00

"You can never really know someone completely. That’s why it’s the most terrifying thing in the world, really—taking someone on faith, hoping they’ll take you on faith too. It’s such a precarious balance, it’s a wonder we do it at all ...."

Libba Bray

Jodi Picoult

2010-06-18T20:16:00.000+02:00

"The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies ... "

Jodi Picoult (Keeping Faith)

T.S. Eliot

2010-06-18T20:15:00.000+02:00

"I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing ... "

T.S. Eliot

Gordon B. Hinckley

2010-05-30T17:50:00.000+02:00

"Stop seeking out the storms and enjoy more fully the sunlight."

Gordon B. Hinckley

Margaret Atwood

2010-05-30T17:48:00.000+02:00

"She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been all that convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting."

Margaret Atwood (Moral Disorder: and Other Stories)

Emily Brontë

2010-05-30T17:45:00.000+02:00

"The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I'm tired, tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart, but really with it, and in it."

Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

G.K. Chesterton

2010-05-30T17:40:00.000+02:00

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."

G.K. Chesterton

Pablo Picasso

2010-05-26T20:21:00.000+02:00

"There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun .."

Pablo Picasso

Laurell K. Hamilton

2010-05-26T20:18:00.001+02:00

"There comes a point when you either embrace who and what you are, or condemn yourself to be miserable all your days. Other people make you miserable; don't help them by doing the job yourself."

Laurell K. Hamilton

Mitch Albom

2010-05-26T20:17:00.000+02:00

"All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair."

Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

Terry Pratchet

2010-05-23T20:57:00.001+02:00

"There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short. "

Terry Pratchett (Mort)

Vincent Van Gogh

2010-05-23T20:55:00.000+02:00

"At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky."

Vincent Van Gogh

Karen Marie Moning

2010-05-23T20:53:00.000+02:00

"I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like."

Karen Marie Moning (Darkfever)

Melissa Bank

2010-05-21T20:30:00.000+02:00

"I felt I couldn't lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I'd lost the hope that I would ever love that way again."

Melissa Bank (The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing)

Nicholas Sparks

2010-05-17T17:19:00.001+02:00

"And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered .. "

Nicholas Sparks

C.S. Lewis

2010-05-15T09:29:00.000+02:00

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

C.S. Lewis

James Baldwin

2010-05-13T17:21:00.001+02:00

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."

James Baldwin

Nicholas Sparks

2010-05-13T17:18:00.001+02:00

"I fell in love, despite our differences, and once I did, something rare and beautiful was created. For me, love like that has only happened once, and that's why every minute we spent together has been seared in my memory. I'll never forget a single moment of it."

Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

Chuck Palahniuk

2010-05-13T17:17:00.001+02:00

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."

Chuck Palahniuk

Albert Einstein

2010-05-13T17:16:00.000+02:00

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy."

Albert Einstein

Robert Frost

2010-05-12T21:42:00.001+02:00

"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length."

Robert Frost

(Aside: a friend commented that she had read this wrong. I replied, that as well :p)

Diane Setterfield

2010-05-12T21:41:00.000+02:00

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic... "

Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

Aldous Huxley

2010-05-12T21:40:00.000+02:00

"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."

Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

Clement Freud

2010-05-12T21:38:00.000+02:00

'If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking & loving, you don't ACTUALLY live longer; it just seems that way ... "

Clement Freud

Tamora Pierce

2010-05-12T21:29:00.000+02:00

"They always forget the last part of that saying: curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back" - or something to that effect anyway."

Tamora Pierce

Virginia Woolf

2010-05-12T21:28:00.000+02:00

"For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver."

Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

Gore Vidal

2010-05-10T20:17:00.001+02:00

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."

Gore Vidal

Stephen Jay Gould

2010-05-10T20:15:00.000+02:00

"We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within."

Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man)

Markus Zusak

2010-05-10T20:14:00.000+02:00

"Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of."

Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

W. Somerset Maugham

2010-05-10T20:12:00.000+02:00

"He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other."

W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

2010-05-02T15:58:00.001+02:00

"Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition ... " - Bell Hooks

Janet Fitch

2010-05-01T21:15:00.000+02:00

"The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart."

Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

Rabindranath Tagore

2010-05-01T21:11:00.000+02:00

"The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end."

Rabindranath Tagore

Rachel Carson

2010-05-01T21:09:00.000+02:00

"If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our
strength .. "

Rachel Carson (The Sense of Wonder)

Alberto Manguel

2010-05-01T21:06:00.000+02:00

"At one magical instant in my early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning. Words spoke to me, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. I became a reader."

Alberto Manguel

2010-05-01T20:44:00.002+02:00

Ian Rankin

2010-04-30T20:21:00.001+02:00

"His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life. "

Ian Rankin (Knots and Crosses)

Laurie Halse Anderson

2010-04-30T20:18:00.001+02:00

"Another page turns on the calendar, May now, not April. I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world. I spin and weave and knit my words until a life starts to take shape. There is no magic cure, no making it all go away. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore. I am thawing."

Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)

Maya Angelou

2010-04-26T09:59:00.000+02:00

"The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them."

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou

2010-04-26T09:57:00.000+02:00

"I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it."

Maya Angelou

La Dolce Vita

2010-04-23T19:15:00.001+02:00

"There’s an ache deep in my belly. Like a bruise. A reminder. And I carry it like a child. Hand over the place where it lives. The spreading purple seeping into the meat of me. Tendrils creeping out to wrap around my heart, my breath, my eyes. Until it’s all tinted with shadow and the sky disappears. And the colour of you is only a memory."

La Dolce Vita

Maggie Stiefvater

2010-04-23T19:14:00.002+02:00

"You're like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again."

Maggie Stiefvater (Shiver)

Maggie Stiefvater

2010-04-23T19:14:00.001+02:00

"You're like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again."

Maggie Stiefvater (Shiver)

Suzanne Finnamore

2010-04-22T20:43:00.000+02:00

"You are the closest I will ever come to magic."

Suzanne Finnamore (The Zygote Chronicles)

Susan Fletcher

2010-04-22T20:40:00.002+02:00

"We carry on. We have ourselves and we carry on- in spite of our losses and mistakes and women, I think, have more than most. We are good secret-keepers. We can tie weights to out guilt and passions, and hatred and deceitfulness, and let them sink down, so that you'd never know they existed at all. But we know. I can count all mine."

Susan Fletcher

Susan Fletcher

2010-04-22T20:40:00.000+02:00

Ian McEwan

2010-04-22T20:32:00.003+02:00

"And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time ... surely his deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their relationship?"

Ian McEwan (Atonement)

Stephen King

2010-04-22T20:27:00.001+02:00

"I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend."

Stephen King (Different Seasons)

Brian Andreas

2010-04-22T20:25:00.000+02:00

"I was waiting for the longest time, she said. I thought you forgot.
It is hard to forget, I said, when there is such an empty space when you are gone."

Brian Andreas (Story People)

Robert Frost

2010-04-22T20:18:00.000+02:00

"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places."

Robert Frost

Gabriel García Márquez

2010-04-22T20:17:00.000+02:00

"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."

Gabriel García Márquez (Collected Stories)

Stephenie Meyer

2010-04-22T20:16:00.002+02:00

Stephenie Meyer

2010-04-22T20:16:00.001+02:00