I Wrote This For You Quotes

That everything you want to happen, will happen, if you decide you want it enough. That every time you think a sad thought, you can think a happy one instead.
That you control that completely.
That the people who make you laugh are more beautiful than beautiful people. That you laugh more than you cry. That crying is good for you. That the people you hate wish you would stop and you do too.
That your friends are reflections of the best parts of you. That you are more than the sum total of the things you know and how you react to them. That dancing is sometimes more important than listening to the music.
That the most embarrassing, awkward moments of your life are only remembered by you and no one else ~ Iain S. Thomas

I need you to understand something. I wrote this for you. I wrote this for you and only you. Everyone else who reads it, doesn't get it. They may think they get it, but they don't. This is the sign you've been looking for. You were meant to read these words. ~ Iain S. Thomas

you weren't mine to begin with. ~ Iain S. Thomas

For I may fall and I may fail but I will stand again each time and you will find no satisfaction. ~ Pleasefindthis

If you really want to know, I just hope I die before I get boring. ~ Iain S. Thomas

And just like a midsummer nights breeze, she ran away, into the moonlight, a fox, proud and strong. The lone wolf walked away, saddened she was gone. ~ Jason Winchester

You cannot kill me here. Bring your soldiers, your death, your disease, your collapsed economy because it doesn't matter, I have nothing left to lose and you cannot kill me here. Bring the tears of orphans and the wails of a mother's loss, bring your God damn air force and Jesus on a cross, bring your hate and bitterness and long working hours, bring your empty wallets and love long since gone but you cannot kill me here. Bring your sneers, your snide remarks and friendships never felt, your letters never sent, your kisses never kissed, cigarettes smoked to the bone and cancer killing fears but you cannot kill me here. For I may fall and I may fail but I will stand again each time and you will find no satisfaction. Because you cannot kill me here. ~ Iain S. Thomas

To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else's. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don't know. I just don't know.

Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. ~ Tara Westover

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day.
Then I knew what the problem was.
I needed experience.
How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing? ~ Sylvia Plath

But Ruth has not read all the letters I've written to her. She couldn't. Though I wrote them for her, I also wrote them for me, after all, and after she passed away, I placed another box beside the original. In this box are letters written with a shaking hand, letters marked only by my tears, not hers. They are letters written on what would have been yet another anniversary. Sometimes I think about reading them, just as she used to, but it hurts me to think that she never had the chance. ~ Nicholas Sparks

I do some freelance web design stuff. I taught a directing class for this not-for-profit organization here in Chicago a couple months ago. I wrote a thing for Filmmaker Magazine a couple months ago. Occasionally, I'll get to go speak to students at a university and make a little money that way, which is great. I really like doing that. ~ Joe Swanberg

But I'm not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I'd developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that's what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it's what I wrote. ~ Neal Stephenson

In college, I faced an interesting problem. I wanted to play music all the time and yet I wasn't ready for anyone to hear it. To remedy this, I took to retreating to stairwells as a safe place to sing and write music. It was there that I wrote most of my songs in college and really grew into an artist. ~ Kina Grannis

Depression, we are told over and over again, is a brain disease, a chemical imbalance that can be adjusted by antidepressant medication. In an informational brochure issued to inform the public about depression, the US National Institute for Mental Health tells people that 'depressive illnesses are disorders of the brain' and adds that 'important neurotransmitters - chemicals that brain cells use to communicate - appear to be out of balance'. This view is so widespread that it was even proffered by the editors of PLoS [Public Library of Science] Medicine in their summary that accompanied our article. 'Depression,' they wrote, 'is a serious medical illness caused by imbalances in the brain chemicals that regulate mood', and they went on to say that antidepressants are supposed to work by correcting these imbalances.
The editors wrote their comment on chemical imbalances as if it were an established fact, and this is also how it is presented by drug companies. Actually, it is not. Instead, even its proponents have to admit that it is a controversial hypothesis that has not yet been proven. Not only is the chemical-imbalance hypothesis unproven, but I will argue that it is about as close as a theory gets in science to being dis-proven by the evidence. ~ Irving Kirsch

Voltaire responded that, on the contrary, vivisection showed that the dog has the same organes de sentiment that a human has. "Answer me, you who believes that animals are only machines," he wrote. "Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all? ~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away. ~ Cheryl Strayed

April ended and May came along, but May was even worse than April. In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass....but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.
At those times I would write to Naoko. In my letters to her, I would describe only things that were touching or pleasant or beautiful: the fragrance of grasses, the caress of a spring breeze, the light of the moon, a movie I'd seen, a song I liked, a book that had moved me. I myself would be comforted by letters like this when I would reread what I had written. And I would feel that the world I lived in was a wonderful one. I wrote any number of letters like this, but from Naoko or Reiko I heart nothing. ~ Haruki Murakami

When I moved to Los Angeles, I wrote spec screenplays. I was really poor, and I thought I was just gonna do this for a while to make a little money so I could write novels. I thought movies were a second-class art form. I condescended to it - I didn't know enough to know it was really gonna be hard. ~ Stephen Gaghan

for the existentialists, what generated anxiety was not the godlessness of the world, per se, but rather the freedom to choose between God and godlessness. Though freedom is something we actively seek, the freedom to choose generates anxiety. "When I behold my possibilities," Kierkegaard wrote, "I experience that dread which is the dizziness of freedom, and my choice is made in fear and trembling." Many people try to flee anxiety by fleeing choice. This helps explain the perverse-seeming appeal of authoritarian societies - the certainties of a rigid, choiceless society can be very reassuring - and why times of upheaval so often produce extremist leaders and movements: Hitler in Weimar Germany, Father Coughlin in Depression-era America, or Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Vladimir Putin in Russia today. But running from anxiety, Kierkegaard believed, was a mistake because anxiety was a "school" that taught people to come to terms with the human condition. ~ Scott Stossel

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being.
- Albert Einstein, 1936, responding to a child who wrote and asked if scientists pray; quoted in: Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffmann ~ Albert Einstein

By and large, the kind of science fiction which makes tomorrow's headlines as near as this morning's coffee has enlarged popular awareness of the modern, miraculous world of science we live in. It has helped generations of young people feel at age with a changing world.
But fashions change, old loves return, and now that Sputniks clutter up the sky with new and unfamiliar moons, the readers of science fiction are willing to wait to read tomorrow's headlines. Once again, I think, there is a place, a wish, a need for the wonder and color of the world way out. The world beyond the stars. The world we won't live to see. That is why I wrote The Door Through Space. ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back. "I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense," C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. "It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs." We ~ Joan Didion

The difference between a person who appreciates books, even loves them, and a collector is not only degrees of affection, I realized. For the former, the bookshelf is a kind of memoir; there are my childhood books, my college books, my favorite novels, my inexplicable choices. Many matchmaking and social networking websites offer a place for members to list what they're reading for just this reason: books can reveal a lot about a person. This is particularly true of the collector, for whom the bookshelf is a reflection not just of what he has read but profoundly of who he is: 'Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they can come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them,' wrote cultural critic Walter Benjamin. ~ Allison Hoover Bartlett

This particular one was very, very heartwarming and is the relationship of an older man and a young boy that are essentially on the run. And so yeah, as I say, Barry Crump wrote a lot of books and this one got into the hands of Taika Watiti who then writing the screenplay decided to really vamp up if that's the word, or ramp up and modernize certain phrases - getting in the humor. So he added a lot of a real comedy perspective onto it which is what I think the story needed anyway, especially for it to turn into a film. And it worked. ~ Rhys Darby

As soon as I was old enough to drive, I got a job at a local newspaper. There was someone who influenced me. He wrote a column for The Guardian from this tiny village in India. ~ Nicholas D. Kristof

And now," Eric yelled into his mircophone, "we're going to sing a new song-one we just wrote. This one's for my girlfriend. We've been going out for three weeks, and, damn, our love is true. We're gonna be together forever, baby. This one's called 'Bang You Like a Drum. ~ Cassandra Clare

One gleeful headline drives me to the floor, kneeling,
and all paint turns to gazette paper and all memory
collides into photographs we could not say happened,
that is us, that's what we did. When you lose you become
ancient but this time no one will rake over these bodies
gently collecting their valuables, their pots, their hearts
and intestines, their papers and what they could bury.
This civilisation will be dug up to burn all its manifestos.
No tender archaeologist will mend our furious writings
concluding, "They wanted sweat to taste sweet, that is all,
some of them played music for nothing, some of them
wrote poems to tractors, rough hands, and rough roads,
some sang for no reason at all to judge by their condition. ~ Dionne Brand

George Stout saw through their acts. "I am sick of all schemers," he wrote, "of all the vain crawling toads who now edge into positions of advantage and look for selfish gain or selfish glory from all this suffering."13 ~ Robert M. Edsel

One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week. ~ Maria Semple

The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, "A serious misfortune of my life has arrived." I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.

I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet... wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as "my" feet were actually "our" feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze. ~ Sherman Alexie

Rudyard Kipling, in his famous poetic description of what makes for mature and effective adulthood, wrote in part: If you can keep your head When all about you Are losing theirs And blaming it on you... If you can trust yourself When all men doubt you... This famous 1909 poem "If" was inspired in Kipling after observing one military leader's actions during the Boer Wars (Lt. Colonel Eduardo Jany, personal communication, October, 2007). ~ Michael J. Asken

For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else. ~ August Wilson

It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists. ~ Robert B. Laughlin

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.' ~ Pat Conroy

See that little stream - we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it - a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation."

"Why, they've only just quit over in Turkey," said Abe. "And in Morocco - "

"That's different. This western-front business couldn't be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn't. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren't any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather's whiskers."

"General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five."

"No, he didn't - he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is a marble statue of a man with his children near him, and the man has such desperation on his face and the children at his feet appear to be clinging, begging him, while he gazes out toward the world with a tortured look, his hands pulling at his nouth, but his children look only at him, and when I finally saw this, I said inside myself, Oh.
I read the placard, which let me know that these children are offering themselves as food for their father, he is being starved to death in prison, and these children only want one thing - to have their father's distress disappear. They will allow him - oh, happily, happily - to eat them.
And I thought, So that guy knew. Meaning the sculptor. He knew.
And so did the poet who wrote what the sculpture has shown. He knew too. ~ Elizabeth Strout

I found this quote for writers on Twitter:
There is a fine line between confidence and delusional thought; cross it.
Don't know who wrote it but thought it was interesting. ~ Robin Glasser

I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote "Ethan Frome" that I suddenly felt the artisan's full control of his implements. When "Ethan Frome" first appeared I was severely criticized by the reviewers for what was considered the clumsy structure of the tale. I had pondered long on this structure, had felt its peculiar difficulties, and possible awkwardness, but could think of no alternative which would serve as well in the given case: and though I am far from thinking "Ethan Frome" my best novel, and am bored and even exasperated when I am told that it is, I am still sure that its structure is not its weak point. ~ Edith Wharton

My job title was youth advocate. My approach was unconditional positive regard. My mission was to help the girl youth succeed in spite of the unspeakably harrowing crap stew they'd been simmering in all of their lives. Succeeding in this context meant getting neither pregnant nor locked up before graduating high school. It meant eventually holding down a job at Taco Bell or Walmart. It was only that! It was such a small thing and yet it was enormous. It was like trying to push an eighteen-wheeler with your pinkie finger. I was not technically qualified to be a youth advocate. I'd never worked with youth or counseled anyone. I had degrees in neither education nor psychology. I'd been a waitress who wrote stories every chance I got for most of the preceding years. But for some reason, I wanted this job and so I talked my way into it. I wasn't meant to let the girls know I was ~ Cheryl Strayed

However, in a later interview, housed in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, Beesly was less judicious. "As an Englishman and a lover of the Royal Navy," he said, "I would prefer to attribute this failure to negligence, even gross negligence, rather [than] to a conspiracy deliberately to endanger the ship." But, he said, "on the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available, I am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance, the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war." So much was done for the Orion and other warships, he wrote, but nothing for the Lusitania. He struggled with this. No matter how he arranged the evidence, he came back to conspiracy. He said, "If that's unacceptable, will someone tell me another explanation to these very very curious circumstances? ~ Erik Larson

Let them judge me as they like, I could deceive them, but myself I cannot deceive ... and strange to say, in this acknowledgement of his baseness there was something painful yet joyful and quieting. More than once in Nekhlyudov's life there had been what he called, 'a cleansing of the soul.' A state of mind in which, after a long period of sluggish inner life ... he began to clear out all the rubbish that had accumulated in his soul and caused the cessation of true life. After such an awakening, Nekhlyudov always made some rules for himself ... wrote in his diary, began afresh ... ~ Leo Tolstoy

Samuel Smiles ends his book with the following moving story of the "gentleman" general:

The gentleman is characterized by his sacrifice of self, and preference of others, in the little daily occurrences of life…we may cite the anecdote of the gallant Sir Ralph Abercromby, of whom it is related, that, when mortally wounded in the battle of Aboukir, and, to ease his pain, a soldier's blanket was placed under his head, from which he experienced considerable relief.
He asked what it was.
"It's only a soldier's blanket," was the reply.
"Whose blanket is it?" said he, half lifting himself up.
"Only one of the men's."
"I wish to know the name of the man whose blanket this is."
"It is Duncan Roy's, of the 42nd, Sir Ralph."
"Then see that Duncan Roy gets his blanket this very night."

Even to ease his dying agony the general would not deprive the private soldier of his blanket for one night.
As Samuel wrote: "True courage and gentleness go hand in hand."
It was in this family, belief system, and heritage that Walter, my great-grandfather, grew up and dared to dream. ~ Bear Grylls