If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you’re willing to risk failure.
—Philip Pullman, Clockwork
Quotes
In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.
—Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park
Putting our minds to something has never been the problem. The problem has been: Who decides whose mind is worthy?
—Amber Tamblyn, Era of Ignition
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
—Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.
—Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
I Choose the Mountain
by Howard Simon
The low lands call
I am tempted to answer
They are offering me a free dwelling
Without having to conquer
The massive mountain makes its move
Beckoning me to ascend
A much more difficult path
To get up the slippery bend
I cannot choose both
I have a choice to make
I must be wise
This will determine my fate
I choose, I choose the mountain
With all its stress and strain
Because only by climbing
Can I rise above the plain
I choose the mountain
And I will never stop climbing
I choose the mountain
And I shall forever be ascending
I choose the mountain
He was sure that even to folks who lived a hundred years—as he hoped to do—it seemed like not much more than a summer afternoon.
—Stephen King, The Colorado Kid
Magic—that’s just a label, you know. Completely meaningless. It wasn’t so very long ago that people were saying that electricity was magic.
—Robert Bloch, Psycho
The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.
—Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things
