Gardner Quotes

As a general rule, highly rational writers (like Nabokov) write most comfortably in the morning, and mainly intuitive writers write most comfortably at night. ~ John Gardner

No one ever laid out the sequence of events that led to my mother being prosecuted and imprisoned for alleged welfare fraud. ~ Chris Gardner

My father tolerated no dramatics of any kind. I'm not certain which is more devilish uncomfortable - too many emotions or none at all. ~ Ashley Gardner

Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach. ~ John W. Gardner

Sometimes the best use of resources is a gift or event that says, "I care." - Jeanette Gardner Littleton ~ Gary Chapman

We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again. ~ John Gardner

It's a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs. ~ John W. Gardner

A profound theme is of trifling importance if the characters knocked around by it are uninteresting, and brilliant technique is a nuisance if it pointlessly prevents us from seeing the characters and what they do. ~ John Gardner

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. ~ John W. Gardner

Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips? ~ Martin Gardner

We're not witches. We're the bogeymen and angels that walk the thin seam of the two worlds, like cats on high-wire beams.
Assassins. Peacekeepers. A secret government that's a two-way mirror. ~ Alyse M. Gardner

Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or "way," an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious - a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand - and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.
John Gardner ~ Marcy Sheiner

Each year before the first rain after the harvest in Spring, I would look at the dry peach tree that I know so well at our backyard and anticipating that in summer it will be covered in an overgrown hedge unless my father who was a committed gardner of note take a weekend off from Jo'burg during the pruning season to prune it. Even now, I still remember with crystal clarity my childhood mood - warm days in Schoonoord with rich nostalgia of green scenery and flowers flowering everywhere.

One evening I was sitting at the veranda of our firehut looking at the orange tree between the plat (flat - roofed) house and the big L - shaped house - the tree served as a shelter from the sun for the drinking water pot next to the plat house - suddenly the weather changed, the wind howled, the tree swayed, the loose corrugated iron sheets on roof of he house clattered and clanged, the open windows shuts with a bang and the sky made night a day, and I was overwhelmed with that feeling of childhood joy at the approaching rain. All of a sudden, the deafening of steady pouring rain. The raging storm beat the orange tree leaves while I sat there remembering that where the orange tree stood used to be our first house, a small triangular shaped mokhukhu ((tin house) made of red painted corrugated iron sheets salvaged from demolishing site in Witbank, also remembering that my aunt's mokhukhu was also made of the same type and colour of corrugated iron sheets. The ashen ground drunk m ~ Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala

Paralysis of leadership is due in part to the unseen grip of the special interests. ~ John W. Gardner

The people I've known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers. ~ John Gardner

I love you Aurora Eden you are so unpredictably predictable! ~ Lyn Gardner

...what was important, what mattered, was not the fact of being afraid, but what you did, the choices you made, when you were afraid. And maybe that was something to do with being alive--or staying dead. ~ Graham Gardner

Comparison is the enemy to creativity. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

The future was uncertain, absolutely, and there were many hurdles, twists, and turns to come, but as long as I kept moving forward, one foot in front of the other, the voices of fear and shame, the messages from those who wanted me to believe that I wasn't good enough, would be stilled. ~ Chris Gardner

Every time he came back, apologetic, contrite, he'd start off being real nice. But he was as predictable as rain. No body knew when he'd go off, but at some point everybody knew he would. ~ Chris Gardner

It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six. ~ John W. Gardner

I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available. ~ Howard Gardner

Kids make their mark in life by doing what they can do, not what they can't ... School is important, but life is more important. Being happy is using your skills productively, no matter what they are. ~ Howard Gardner

It is strange how the presence of additional people can make you feel more alone. ~ James Alan Gardner

A man's character and honor made him stand above others, not his religion or strata in life. ~ Ashley Gardner

The Marquis looked very grave and replied, 'I knew, of course, the minute whalebone corsets went out of fashion that things were coming to a pretty pass. ~ Sally Gardner

Einstein felt that he did not have great mathematical gifts and deliberately chose not to take courses and to continue in that area.

The fact that I neglected mathematics to a certain extent had its causes not merely in my stronger interest in science than in mathematics but also in the following strange experience....I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialties, each of which could easily absorb the short lifetime granted to us....In physics, however, I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential.

This capacity to pick out important issues dovetailed with Einstein's search for the most general possible conception. "In a man of my type," he declared, "the turning point of the development lies in the fact that gradually the major interest disengages itself to a far reaching degree from the momentary and the merely personal and turns toward the striving for a mental grasp of things. ~ Howard Gardner

If you agree to work for us, half the time you won't know the purpose of your duties ... and when we do explain, we might not be telling the truth. But that's the real world, folks ... ~ James Alan Gardner

The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it's hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than that one should never be dependent. Hence the novice or still unsuccessful writer, who has enough trouble believing in himself, has the added burden of shame. It's hard to be a good writer and a guilty person; a lack of self-respect creeps into one's prose. ~ John Gardner

Winners never quit, quitters never win ~ Lisa Gardner

Space hurls outwards, falconswift, mounting like an irreversible justice, a final disease ~ John Gardner

They only think they think. No total vision, total system, merely schemes with a vague family resemblance, no more identity than bridges and, say, spiderwebs. But they rush across chasms on spiderwebs, and sometimes they make it, and that, they think, settles that! ~ John Gardner

Rose Gardner, what in heaven's name happened ~ Denise Grover Swank

His job already had him lying and manipulating me. My past had me lying and manipulating him. Both of us thought we were right. ~ Lisa Gardner

Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic. ~ Martin Gardner

Life is like that. We can only see from birth to death. The rest of it is cut from our vision." Drake ~ Erle Stanley Gardner

He shook his head. "Not a bit of it. When I arrived, I was small and dark and ugly. The perfect quarry for every bully. And then, one day, I grew tired of it. I had discovered that sarcasm and wit could be far more effective than fists. The duller-brained the boy, the more others laughed at my bons mots. And so I became a nasty bit of goods in my own way, fighting with words where I could not fight with fists. ~ Ashley Gardner

But that's her problem, not mine. No, my problem is elephantine. How do you eat an elephant, sir? Bit by tiny bit. ~ Sally Gardner

I'm here to tell you, there ain't much forgiveness in that old-time religion. That particular savior was a mean son of a bitch. If you sinned, honey, he was going to get you, no doubt about it. ~ Ava Gardner

It was not the past that broke you. - It was the empty future, the endless string of days filled with none of the people who mattered most. ~ Lisa Gardner

Love is who you are, don't resist it. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.
'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all. ~ John Gardner

Anything that is worth teaching can be presented in many different ways. These multiple ways can make use of our multiple intelligences. ~ Howard Gardner

If the modern leader doesn't know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance. ~ John W. Gardner

When anxiety comes knocking on your door, don't invite it in. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

Let me be the first to say, there isn't a hell big enough for some of the assholes we have walking here on this earth. ~ Lisa Gardner

Profoundly moved, he kissed the lax waiting mouth with exquisite unhappiness. ~ Leonard Gardner

Claim ownership of your dreams ~ Chris Gardner

The world loves talent but pays off on character. ~ John W. Gardner

I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the 'tragic sense of life', from this despair, faith comes to the rescue, not only as something nonrational but in a sense irrational. For Unamuno the great symbol of a person of faith was his Spanish hero Don Quixote. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd. Let us admit it. Let us concede to everything! To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is a Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son.

What can be said in reply? How can a fideist admit that faith is a kind of madness, a dream fed by passionate desire, and yet maintain that one is not mad to make the leap? ~ Martin Gardner

Some see the glass half full, some see it half empty, and some see it crawling with toxic alien parasites who want to devour your pancreas. ~ James Alan Gardner

I hate cheating. I won't put up with it. I don't do it myself. ~ Ava Gardner

I'm coming back for you, Camryn Blue Gardner, so you'd better be waiting for me, or I'll just have to come find you and remind you why you fell crazy in love with me. ~ Nicole Williams

In an interview in the Paris Review, novelist and Rebel John Gardner made an observation that I've never forgotten: Every time you break the law you pay, and every time you obey the law you pay. ~ Gretchen Rubin

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems. ~ John W. Gardner

There's something about putting on a pair of skates, and getting out there and moving like nobody else can. Freedom is a word that comes to mind. ~ Randy Gardner

A dragon is a confusion at the heart of things, a law unto himself. He embraces good, evil, and indifference; in his own nature he makes them indivisible and absolute. He knows who he is. Surely you see that... Put it this way. Dragons all love life's finer things- music, art, treasure- the works of the spirit; yet in their personal habits they're foul and bestial- they burn down cathedrals, for instance, and eat maidens- and they see in their whimsical activities no faintest contradiction... Dragons never grow, never change... Believe me, nothing in this world is more despicable than a dragon. They're a walking- or flying- condemnation of all we stand for, all we pray for our children, nay, for ourselves. We struggle to improve ourselves, we tortuously balance on the delicate line between our duties to society and our duties within- our duties to God and our own nature. ~ John Gardner

When I lose my temper, honey, you can't find it any place. ~ Ava Gardner

When we praise God in the midst of our "darkness," God is moved by our faith. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

Every second is your own. Make it count. ~ Mike Gardner

What I learned is that it's arrogant to be certain of anything. The world is a complex place and only idiots or assholes think they know it all. ~ Lisa Gardner

it, Shep does his ordering for the department and for himself all from the same manufacturer. ~ Lisa Gardner

I look down past the stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving towards it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death. ~ John Gardner

The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing. ~ Erle Stanley Gardner

How I perceive others is a direct reflection of the judgments that I have placed over my own life. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc. ~ Howard Gardner

The biggest communities in which young people now reside are online communities. ~ Howard Gardner

A nation is held together by shared values, shared beliefs, shared attitudes. That is what enables a people to maintain a cohesive society despite the tensions of daily life. This is what enables them to rise above the conflicts that plague any society. That is what gives a nation its tone, its fiber, its integrity, its moral style, its capacity to endure. ~ John W. Gardner

[the writer] must copy, with his finite mind, the process of the infinite 'I AM. ~ John Gardner

Being from Texas, I didn't know anything about gangsters and people like that, I had no fear of people. ~ Carl Gardner

The best shows have a clear idea of what they want to achieve, where the performers have the ability to disrupt normality and engage directly with audiences of all ages. A company who can do just that (apparently effortlessly) is dotComedy. ~ Lyn Gardner

Gilgamesh said to him, to Utnapishtim the remote,
What can I do, Utnapishtim? Where can I go?
A thief has stolen my flesh.
Death lives in the house where my bed is,
and wherever I set my feet, there Death is. ~ John Gardner

Wouldn't it be good if we could let teachers do what they do best - teach. Not judge each child on a series of standardized exams. Let schools embrace, not exclude, those like me with a different way of thinking.
Stop praising literacy with one hand and closing libraries with the other. Let librarians be free to do what they do best: encourage a lifelong love of reading in every child, even the ones without a hope of ever getting an A star. ~ Sally Gardner

Some people seem to believe that for each problem there is a solution readily available - a solution that can be promptly achieved by passing a law and voting some money. I think of this as the vending machine concept of social change. Put a coin in the machine and out comes a piece of candy. If there is a social problem, pass a law and out comes a solution. ~ John W. Gardner

All mathematicians share ... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics. ~ Martin Gardner

Ready or not, Tell yourself to jump ~ Chris Gardner

University of Chicago is a Baptist school, where atheist professors teach Jewish students about St. Thomas Aquinas. ~ Martin Gardner

Whomever speaks first gives up some power. ~ Lisa Gardner

Special Agent Quincy had earned his stripes as one of the Bureau's finest profilers. ~ Lisa Gardner

What I can do, I will do. What I can't do, I will surrender to the one that can. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

Talking, talking, spinning a spell, pale skin of words that closes me in like a coffin. Not in a language that anyone any longer understands. Rushing, degenerate mutter of noises I send out before me wherever I creep, like a dragon burning his way through vines and fog. ~ John Gardner

It is important for leaders to know their stories; to get them straight; to communicate them effectively, particularly to those who are in the thrall of rival stories; and, above all, to embody in their lives the stories that they tell. ~ Howard E. Gardner

We need to focus on the kind of human beings we want to have and the kind of society in which we want to live ~ Howard Gardner

Goddamn himself for letting his independence slip away from him. He didn't even know how it had happened, how he had lost the ability to function on his own, or what the hell he was going to do about it now. ~ Kimberly Gardner

I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it, but I didn't, not really. Only the smudgeness of it; the pink-slippered, all-containered, semi-precious eagerness of it. I didn't realize it would sometimes be more than whole, that the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea. Because it's the halves that halve you in half. I didn't know, don't know, about the in-between bits; the gory bits of you, and the gory bits of me. ~ Anna Maria Gardner

Love your enemies and drive them nuts. ~ Brother Dave Gardner

That we do not comprehend or accept something does not invalidate its truth. ~ Ian Gardner

Jesus has prayed over us that our faith in Him will not fail but rather be strengthened by the process we go through. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

The point is, whether or not they show it at dinner parties, writers learn, by a necessity of their trade, to be the sharpest of observers. ~ John Gardner

The problem that we have is the President himself- a President who prides himself on his own weakness and incompetence and whose love of false prophets and strange women knows no bounds and has no end. A President who is as confused and as clueless as the comic character called Chancey Gardner in the celebrated 1970's Peter Seller's Hollywood blockbuster titled Being There ~ Femi Fani-Kayode

Sometimes all the procedures in the world can't protect you ... but that's no reason to walk up to something that looks like a lion and kick it in the ass. ~ James Alan Gardner

Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one's powers and talents. ~ John W. Gardner

There is no truth I hate, it is blinded by rage. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

You know what gets to me, though? You know what's truly ironic?

What?

She needed us. She was exactly the kind of person that my father and I have sworn our lives to protect. She wasn't tough. She made bad choices. She drank too much, she dated the wrong men, she believed anyone's pack of lies. God, she desperately needed someone to save her from herself. And we didn't do it. I spent so much of my childhood resenting her. Crying, complaining Mandy who was always upset about something. Now, I just wonder why we didn't take better care of her. She was in our own family. How could we fail her so completely? ~ Lisa Gardner

In the picture, Ava Gardner's tousled black hair obscured her right eye, and her full, closed lips were pulled slightly to the right, resulting in something less than a smile. They looked as if they'd been smeared shut with red paint, though the photo was in black and white. It wasn't so much a fuck-me face as a I've-been-there-and-back look, the kind of expression you see only on the most expensive whores. ~ Barry Gifford

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. ~ John W. Gardner

Greed can destroy so much," Sir Montague nodded. ~ Ashley Gardner

We have to face the fact that most men and women out there are more stale than they know, more bored than they care to admit. ~ John W. Gardner

I want to remember it all, the good times and the bad times, the late nights, the boozing, the dancing into dawns, and all the great and not-so-great people I met and loved in those years ... ~ Ava Gardner

There is the joy that is one's state of the being and there is the joy that is one's state of mind. The first is permanent and the second is impermanent. ~ Ian Gardner