Words worth keeping

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,That we may record our emptiness.

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.

The world was hers for the reading.

The first draft of anything is shit.

We live for books.

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!

There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.