Beautiful Writing Quotes

[T]welve year old Libby O'Shea coasted on a homemade swing, toes touching a blinding-blue heaven dolloped with clouds. ~ Julie Lessman

If a soul could leave the body, she thought, this is the sound it would make: like the screech of a nail being pulled from old wood. ~ Celeste Ng

One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see. ~ Henri Nouwen

When he reached the end, he did not die. He called your name and began to live in you. ~ Anthony Marra

Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father's head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the dayshine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him. ~ Christina Stead

From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us
mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him fro ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

A treasure more precious than platinum or gold in your heart ~ Imran Shaikh

I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement. ~ Sally Mann

Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal - a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty. ~ Brian Morton

Her beautiful face was blank as an unwritten book. ~ Naomi Novik

Something wrong?"
"No." David's voice was low and full of emotion. "I just wanted to look at you."
"What do you see?"
"My future. ~ Shira Anthony

Beautiful writing is more than pretty prose. It creates resonance in readers' minds with parallels, reversals, and symbols. It conjures a story world that is unique, highly detailed, and brought alive by the characters that dwell there. It offers moments of breath-catching surprise, heart-gripping insight, revelation, and self-understanding. It engages the reader's mind with an urgent point, which we might call theme. ~ Donald Maass

But we were different now. I wanted only his pain, and judging from the girl he'd come home with last night, Madoc was still the same. A user. ~ Penelope Douglas

Writing a novel is like pottery. Your initial draft of your story is like a lump of clay. Editing is like shaping that piece of clay into something interesting and beautiful. ~ Monika Pardon

His eyes are a midnight moment filled with memories, the only windows into my world. ~ Tahereh Mafi

It's very hard to write about that which is always beautiful and pleasant and good. You don't get anywhere with it. There's no friction in it. There's no trouble. You have to have trouble. Somebody's got to get in trouble, or no one wants to read it. ~ Paul Bowles

The supernatural is natural, and wonderment can come from the most mundane movement, like a heartbeat or a glance. ~ David Levithan

What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous. ~ Jonathan Galassi

Rome and New York were impressive, but they knew they were. They had the beauty of a vain woman who had squeezed herself into her favourite dress after hours of careful self worship. There was a raw, feral beauty about this landscape that was totally unselfconscious but no less real...There was no pomp or vainty here; this was an innocent, natural beauty, the best kind, like a woman first thing in the morning, lit up by the sun streaming through a window, who doesn't quite believe it when you tell her how beautiful she is. ~ Leonardo Donofrio

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age. ~ Arundhati Roy

The inside of his skull, it tasted like roses and barbed wire and butterflies. Switchblades and heroin and grassy green gardens. ~ Mercedes M. Yardley

She wanted to stay out there, to hang on her branch in the world until the cold had burned down to her bones. She could leave her whitened bones scattered on the snow and depart like light. Whitened bones. A whited sepulcher. ~ Adam Foulds

A poet could write volumes about diners, because they're so beautiful. They're brightly lit, with chrome and booths and Naugahyde and great waitresses. Now, it might not be so great in the health department, but I think diner food is really worth experiencing periodically. ~ David Lynch

And what a tree took away a tree shall restore ~ William Langland

The whistle dropped from the branch's spindly fingers like a black cocoon, a pendulum of secret music; the wind pushed sound soundlessly around. ~ Karen Russell

He who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful ... will not, when in earnest, write them in ink. ~ Plato

But by spring, she had again yielded to the tug and tide of his mind, allowing its currents to carry her back across the continent and wash them up on the remote shores of his evergreen island.. ~ Ruth Ozeki

Nothing is set in stone. A bird can be refolded into a boat, a fish, a kimono, or any other extravagant vision. At other times it aches to return to its original folds. The paper begins to fray. It tires, rebels. ~ Tor Udall

The baby girl who lifted the flaps of Rod Campbell's Dear Zoo becomes the toddler charmed by Ludwig Behmelman's Madeline who turns into the sixth grader listening open-mouthed to Mark Halperin's A Kingdom Far and Clear who grows up to be the young woman swept away by Leo Tolstoy and the beautiful, ill-fated heroine of Anna Karenina. Each book makes straight the path for the next, opening out into sunlit literary meadows where, over time, young people will encounter beautiful writing and characters and scenes that may have been known, loved, and remembered by generations long since past. For the child, or teenager, or anyone else for that matter, getting these tickets to arcadia is a matter of simplicity. All they have to do is listen. ~ Meghan Cox Gurdon

I just don't know what makes a picture, really - the thing that makes it is something unique, as far as I can understand. Just like one guy can write a sentence and it's beautiful and another one can write it and it's dead. What the difference is, I don't know. ~ Harry Callahan

Maybe princes aren't real," Sada said. Her eyes were crafty and sad at the same time. "But monsters are." She opened her mouth wide and showed Azhar the wildflowers sitting on her tongue. ~ Mercedes M. Yardley

He supposed that if he were a young female hitchhiker, he might ask a question or two himself before hopping willy-nilly into someone's car or truck. It might not help, but it sure couldn't hurt. Because once you were out in the desert, anything could happen to you. ~ Stephen King

Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R. ~ Virginia Woolf

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

The beauty of existence is my joy. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

They were interesting things, stars. Like clouds, you could see them and could not deny their existence. Yet you couldn't touch them, hold them, or own them. You couldn't feel them. Love was somewhat the opposite, he pondered. It can't be seen but it can be felt. It was intangible, like the stars and the clouds, like the heavens and destiny. Yet it existed, he knew this to be true. ~ Paige Elwood

I wasn't sure what I'd done to deserve such a wonderful gift, and I wasn't sure if it was insolent, but I thanked God for fallen angels. ~ Jamie McGuire

Life is a beautiful dream. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day. ~ Van Wyck Brooks

It's much more important to write than to be written about. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Alone was the note that Cade knew best. It was the root of all her chords. ~ Amy Rose Capetta

In that brief moment, I understood. The doubt, the hesitation, the mourning of a future I'd never have-it belonged to her as well. Gone was the spitting hellcat. Now, there was only a woman. And she was small. And she was frightened. And she was strong. And she was asking me to be the same. ~ Shelby Mahurin

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential. ~ Mary Karr

I love the sight of his naked body.
especially in these quiet, vulnerable moments. These brackets of time stapled between dreams and reality are my favorite. There's a sweetness in this hesitant consciousness - a careful, gentle return of form of function, I've found I love these minutes most for the delicate way in which they unfold. It's tender.
Slow motion.
Time tying its shoes. ~ Tahereh Mafi

He looks up at her, and behind her, at the sky, which holds more stars than he ever has seen at one time, crowded together, a mess of dust and gems. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

We barely touched, I barely breathed, and time barely moved. Even my heartbeat, which thundered in my ears, seemed to slow down until every. Single. Beat had time to echo into silence before the next one took its place. ~ L.A. Witt

I see harmony in everything. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The closest I'd ever got to seeing a naked woman before was black and white cleavage, and then Rosie tossed her clothes in a corner just like they were getting in the way and spun around in the dim light of Number 16, palms up, luminous, laughing, almost close enough to touch. The thought still knocks the wind out of me. I was too young even to know what I wanted to do about her, I just knew nothing in the World, not the Mona Lisa walking through the Grand Canyon with the Holy Grail in one hand and a winning lotto ticket in the other, was ever going to be that beautiful. ~ Tana French

Poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words bust be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I'm not sure. But there's something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There's a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we'd never say in the light. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Twenty minutes into our walk away from the wall put us deep in a forest of fir, pine, cottonwood, and aspen trees. The lush forest floor was alive and danced with shadows cast from an endless parade of swaying trees. As we approached early evening it was cool and peaceful. The sound of the trees moving in the wind high above seemed like a friendly traveling companion, calling us farther and farther into the depths of the forest. ~ Patrick Carman

He pulled her close and kissed her beneath a blanket of stars, wondering how on earth he'd been so lucky to find her. ~ Nicholas Sparks

People associate me with a time when movies were pleasant, when women wore pretty dresses in films and you heard beautiful music. I always love it when people write me and and say 'I was having a rotten time, and I walked into a cinema and saw one of your movies, and it made such a difference.' ~ Audrey Hepburn

Listen to your instinct. It is your greatest treasure. Your beauty in the outside reflects your inner beauty. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

It was becoming a nightmare. Ronan could hear the night horrors coming, in love with his blood and his sadness. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

But in the name of all that is holy, Mosca, of all the people you could have taken up with, why Eponymous Clent?" murmured Kohlrabi.
Because I'd been hording words for years, buying them from peddlers and carving them secretly on bits of bark so I wouldn't forget them, and then he turned up using words like "epiphany" and "amaranth." Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn't since they burned my father's books. Because he walked into Chough with stories from exciting places tangled around him like maypole streamers ... "
Mosca shrugged.
"He's got a way with words. ~ Frances Hardinge

Sometimes I wore smiles but didn't feel them. Sometimes I felt them and didn't wear them. I didn't want her to know how much I craved this. I bit my bottom lip. ~ Penelope Douglas

I couldn't speak;I only nodded,and it sent a tear sliding down my cheek,to her hand. "See?"she said with a quavering smile. "You feel so much,Sawyer. So much. "She wiped the tear into her palm. "I'm going to keep this,"she said,then turned and walked away. ~ Emma Scott

Most guys, Madoc, like something different. You know why you want to see me in "nice," skimpy things? Because the more I show, the less I'm hiding. I scare you. ~ Penelope Douglas

She had been born with a different name, to a woman with laughing eyes and warmly whispered words of love who'd died degraded and afraid on a misty Irish morning. ~ C.S. Harris

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river. ~ John Steinbeck

Guys didn't like their cars messed with. And I didn't like being messed with, so I guessed we were even. ~ Penelope Douglas

A small glimpse of what she hold inside. .her secrets , her desire, love, hopes and dreams . every line has its own meaning. ~ Imran Shaikh

In the bush he taught the knots I use to tie my blanket to my saddle Ds also the way I stand to use a carpenter's plane and the trick of catching fish with a bush fly and a strip of greenhide these things are like the dark marks made in the rings of great trees locked forever in my daily self. ~ Peter Carey

Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny. ~ Pat Conroy

I've always known that I've wanted to write, but I always saw myself doing that in the context of something other than film, so it was a really beautiful and kind of perfect moment in my life when I realized that I could combine this idea of wanting to write and tell my own stories with the environment I had grown up in and knew well - that I could make film as opposed to writing being a departure from what I knew. ~ Sarah Polley

Some few there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful happenings. ~ James Branch Cabell

At these times, the things that troubled her seemed far away and unimportant: all that mattered was the hum of the bees and the chirp of birdsong, the way the sun gleamed on the edge of a blue wildflower, the distant bleat and clink of grazing goats. ~ Alison Croggon

There was a drop of human blood in her, and in her father ... it brought both of them visions at times, living dreams of the world beyond the wood. Her father had learned to ignore them, for they meant nothing to him. She, still learning words for her own world, did not make such distinctions: Everything was new, everything spoke to her and had a name; she had not yet learned that something could mean nothing. ~ Patricia A. McKillip

MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps All
REALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time ~ Lisa Cron

It was ancient and had risen from the boiling earth. It had slept, falling dormant in the dust, rising in mist. Tuberculosis had flown in a dizzy rush to unite with warm life. It was in each new world, and every old world. First it loved animals, then it loved people too. ~ Louise Erdrich

Something is going to happen, Laura thought. She was going to be kissed. On one side of a kiss was childhood, sunshine,innocence, toys and, on the other, people embracing, darkness, passion and the admittance of a person who, no matter how loved, must always have a quality of otherness, not only to her confidence, but somehow inside her sealing skin. ~ Margaret Mahy

To stop crying, my Raisa... laugh. ~ Esther M. Friesner

Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ... ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A land of brass and steel and clockwork, of steam airships, cogs that turned and wheels that spun. ~ Emma Trevayne

The water in the drains below the cobbles muttered. ~ Natasha Pulley

Fallon continued. "We learned in school that bullies abuse others because they feel bad about themselves. They're hurting." She brought up her knees and locked her arms around them, her tone light and taunting. "We shouldn't be mad. We should pity them." Madoc has never had to make a real decision in his entire life, which means he's never had anything real. This house, the cars, the money. It's all an illusion. It's like parading a victory when you missed the war." She took a breath and whispered slowly. "Madoc has no idea who he is. ~ Penelope Douglas

It was a place of brilliant sunlight, never undappled. Shafts of lemon-gold brilliance lanced down to the forest floor between bars and pools of brown-green shade; and the light was never still, never constant, because drifting mist would often float among the treetops, filtering all the sunlight to a pearly sheen and brushing every pine cone with moisture that glistened when the mist lifted. Sometimes the wetness in the clouds condensed into tiny drops half mist and half rain, which floated downward rather than fell, making a soft rustling patter among the millions of needles.

There was a narrow path beside the stream, which led from a village-little more than a cluster of herdsmen's dwellings - at the foot of the valley to a half-ruined shrine near the glacier at its head, a place where faded silken flags streamed out in the Perpetual winds from the high mountains, and offerings of barley cakes and dried tea were placed by pious villagers. An odd effect of the light, the ice, and the vapor enveloped the head of the valley in perpetual rainbows. ~ Philip Pullman

I admire Joyce Maynard a lot, specifically her memoir "At Home in the World." Her writing is beautiful and fascinating and seemed to give me validation to the idea that I could write validly in earnest about my life with (my) very feminine point of view, and also that I could unapologetically explore the bad traits of my character (which I find to be more interesting to explore than the good traits), as well as explore other concepts that interest me like private vs public personas, age gap relationships, etc. ~ Marie Calloway

The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing, and put it into a story. ~ Scott Rudin

Writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific, concrete. ~ Ralph Fletcher

I'm like the moon," he started, "the hidden side of the moon. Not seen because it don't want to be seen. Everyone knows ther's is shadow there, but no one looks. It's like that with me, Byrd. I'm part illuminated, part in shadow-and that part that shines is all you ever wanted to see. But it kept getting smaller, and now it's dark. I'm a new moon now, Byrd. All there is, is shadow. Can you still see me? Do you still love me? ~ Suzanne Palmieri

The wind swoops over the tenements on Orchard Street, where some of those starry-eyed dreams have died and yet other dreams are being born into squalor and poverty, an uphill climb. It gives a slap to the laundry stretched on lines between tenements, over dirty, broken streets where, even at this hour, hungry children scour the bins for food. The wind has existed forever. It has seen much in this country of dreams and soap ads, old horrors and bloodshed. It has played mute witness to its burning witches, and has walked along a Trail of Tears; it has seen the slave ships release their human cargo, blinking and afraid, into the ports, their only possession a grief they can never lose. ~ Libba Bray

Fallon affected my body in weird ways. But only because she's different, I told myself. ~ Penelope Douglas

I somehow always have this idea that as soon as I can get through this work that's piled up ahead of me, I'll really write a beautiful thing. But I never do. I always have the idea that someday, somehow, I'll be living a beautiful life. ~ Rose Wilder Lane

Mara : I'm too selfish to leave you
Noah Shaw : I'm too selfish to let you ~ Michelle Hodkin

He was here. We were alone. We were angry. Déjà vu. ~ Penelope Douglas

The ending of your story all depends on the beginning of ours. ~ Piper Payne

. . .She started to feel a bubble of lightness coming up through her ribs. It had been very fragile at first, but she thought now it was made of something stronger than suds. . .
(p. 121) ~ Natasha Pulley

There are those of us who haven't yet told our stories, or refuse to tell them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shell or the shock - perhaps I must tell it before it is forgotten or becomes like everything else, something else. ~ Colum McCann

Dare to explore the beautiful places of the world. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

May God redeem mankind. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Donna E. Smyth - adventures with words; she is always doing something new and unique. Beginning with her visceral morality, her stories are startling, nerve wracking, provocative: she combines Angela Carter's beautiful style with Patricia Highsmith's malevolent atmospheres. Smyth shatters clichs and dismisses mere sociology. She knows that pleasure is besieged by terror. She tells us what we don't want to know, but need to know. Smyth's writing disturbs us, enrichingly, because truth can never be at peace with language. ~ George Elliott Clarke

she is born in the breath of a cloud ~ Patrick Ness

Writing is making a mess, and then working and reworking to create a beautiful piece. ~ Heather Sellers

Fire wouldn't burn he; blade wouldn't cut her, no matter how long we hacked away. ~ Naomi Novik

All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind. ~ Sarah Dessen

The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing. ~ Brian Morton

A man was standing at the end of the hallway, just outside an open door, from where a great light shone, illuminating him almost as a god. ~ John Boyne