Babble On

a collection of quotes

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

—Ernest Hemingway  

(Source: thegirlwhostillsmiles, via longlivethequeen)

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you —
Then, it will be true.

—Theme For English B by Langston Hughes (via inennui)

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.

—Janet Fitch, White Oleander (via allthenight-tide) (via seashelllz)

[By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.]

Beloved.

—Beloved by Toni Morrison (via the-final-sentence:awritersruminations)

It’s absolutely essential that a writer know himself, for until he knows his abilities and limitations, his talents and problems, he will be unable to produce anything of real value. Secondly, you must be able to look coldly at what you do. The writer must know for whom he writes, why he writes, and if his writing says what he means for it to say. Writing is, in a way, a contest of knowing, of seeing the dream, of getting there, and of achieving what you set out to do. The simplest way to reach this goal is to simply say what you mean as clearly and precisely as you know how.

—Harper Lee (via awritersruminations)

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

—Barbara Kingsolver (julie911) (quote-book)

This is a love song, which, if you’re familiar with my love songs, means that something is going to have to get broken before it gets done, and then two or more people will have to gather around the broken pieces that remain and try to read them like fortune tellers divining the future in animal entrails. I have some news for the people in this song and for anyone who shares their notions: animal entrails can’t tell you anything. The future will be brighter if you stop breaking stuff, no matter how exhilarated it makes you feel in the short term. What is the use, though, in trying to convince our lovers that the road to ecstasy doesn’t pass through the valley of total damage? It’s not that they want to “learn it the hard way.” It’s that they don’t want to learn.

—John Darnielle on his song Psalms 40:2, courtesy of Jesse Burke
(sheol) (fuckyeahthemountaingoats) (thisbodysfabric)

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

—Tom Perrotta; Little Children (via wordpainting)

As a woman, I have no country.
As a woman, I want no country.
As a woman, the whole world is my country.

—Virginia Woolf - Three Guineas

This wasn’t just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.

—Dorothy Parker (via quote-book)

… diaries shall forever whisper from their cupboards …
I was, I was - I am.

—Thomas Mallon - “Epilogue”

I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.

—Marguerite Yourcenar (via nathanielstuart)