Blog Quotes

“The truth is that the world is full of dragons, and none of us are as powerful or cool as we’d like to be. And that sucks. But when you’re confronted with that fact, you can either crawl into a hole and quit, or you can get out there, take off your shoes, and Bilbo it up.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

“This is going to take a while. I'm a fantasy author. We have trouble with the concept of brevity.”
― Brandon Sanderson

“The only real battle in life is between hanging on and letting go.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“I checked out your blog.'
Oh. Dear. Baby. Jesus. How did he find it? Wait. More importantly was the fact he HAD found it. Was my blog now googleable? That was awesomesauce with an extra heaping of sauce.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, Obsidian

“After all, it's all kinds of things that make up a life, right? The big, like falling in love and spending time with your family, and the little....like blow drying your hair, applying concealer, and cursing those magazine inserts. It all counts. It has to.”
― Sarah Dessen

“The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.”
― Russell Brand

“Politeness is the first thing people lose once they get the power.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written--when only I can see them--from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love wihout contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“The Top Ten Reasons Why Virgin Val Sucks
10. She called me a one-hit-wonder.
9. She doesn’t appreciate the endearing nickname I gave her.
8. She makes me write stupid blogs about her at four in the morning.
7. She’s encouraging people not to have sex.
6. She blew me off when I asked her out.
5. She has a crush on a douche bag.
4. She won’t answer any of my calls.
3. She’s such a tease with her look-but-don’t-touch policy.
2. I played a whole effing concert just for her and she didn’t come even though she told me she would. (You’re such a liar!)
And the #1 reason why Virgin Val sucks?
I still want her anyway.”
― Kelly Oram, V is for Virgin

“All worries are less with wine.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Take care of your costume and your confidence will take care of itself.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Great losses are great lessons.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Be a worthy worker and work will come.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.”
― Ann Brashares

“Father has a strengthening character like the sun and mother has a soothing temper like the moon.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get.

See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On.

The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour.

And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.”
― Catherynne M. Valente

“My blog is a collection of answers people don’t want to hear to questions they didn’t ask.”
― Sebastyne Young

“The decision is your own voice, an opinion is the echo of someone else's voice.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Nothing like being scolded by a hippie.”
― Sarah Dessen

“Mixing old wine with new wine is stupidity, but mixing old wisdom with new wisdom is maturity.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Common man's patience will bring him more happiness than common man's power.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“A farmer is a magician who produces money from the mud.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“If you can't impress them with your argument, impress them with your actions.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Networking isn't how many people you know, it's how many people know you.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“During a conversation, listening is as powerful as loving.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“If thinking should precede acting, then acting must succeed thinking.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Q: Why do you use swear words on your blog, but never the F word?
A: Because I'm saving the F word for the day when I write a blog post about the for-profit health insurance industry and the way its CEOs become wealthy by not only preying on, but exacerbating, other people's personal tragedies.
*ahem*
Happy Monday, everyone :o)”
― Kristin Cashore

“The smell of the sweat is not sweet, but the fruit of the sweat is very sweet.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words