Readers Favorite Quotes

The last chapter in 'Alice in Worcestershire' is called 'Writing the book'.
I started to write that 'Diary' chapter at the very beginning of the process and followed it through to the end... speaking to the reader.

My decision to do this was because I've often read autobiographies and wondered how the author felt and how it impacted them writing about painful memories that had been locked away in a deep forgotten place.
I wanted to know what was going in their 'present' life while they were writing; about the struggle with sharing their inner secrets and... I'm... inquisitive. (nosy)!

It took me over five years to finish 'Alice in Worcestershire' because sometimes, I was simply too drained to continue. Periodically, I updated the 'Diary' chapter and, thankfully, it's enthusiastically appreciated by readers. ~ Eskay Teel

The signs had been there for anyone to see, but Doug had hidden them well, from the torture of animals to the rape of a peer. " - KJ Simmill for Readers' Favorite ~ Cheryl Denise Bannerman

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought. ~ Gertrude Stein

The American Museum of Natural History is my son's absolute favorite place in the world! So we really, really, really love New York. ~ Mark Teixeira

I lay in the pile, rolling through his slight scent, which I pretended was still there. I whispered his name, as if he could hear me, and I hugged the thought of him kissing me and holding me in his arms. The tears of my pained heart released on the sleeve of Steven's favorite T-shirt, and I fell more and more into my sorrow. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

Saturday-morning cartoon sure aren't what they used to be. The animation is lazy. Too clean. He misses being able to detect pencil lines and paint strokes in his favorite cartoon characters, his mind never quite separating the creatures from the art that brought them to life. ~ Kara Lee Corthron

San Francisco was her favorite. It was the kind of city where being independent was valued, not pitied or regarded as a problem to be rectified by well-meaning friends. ~ Susan Wiggs

My favorite songwriting trick is writing something like 'XO.' In my brain, I thought, 'This is probably going to be a love song. How can I change that and find ways to twist that.' As a songwriter, it's your job for the song to take twists and turns that people don't expect. ~ Kelsea Ballerini

Yes, I eat nothing but shit food and coffee. So what? Guys in my line of work, there's no retirement package. Sooner or later, the fatality rate was a hundred percent. My unofficial motto: eat crap food, bed beautiful women, and slaughter as many unholy sons-of-bitches of the Midnight as I can. Life is short. Insert your favorite slogan here. ~ Joey Ruff

My favorite short stories are by Alice Munro, especially her collections 'Carried Away' and 'Runaway.' ~ Hillary Clinton

What The Mysteries of Udolpho suggests is how a novel, by presenting phenomena before it present resolutions, can create an on-going, perhaps spurious, but nevertheless compelling dynamic between details which can undermine the ability of form to impose its particular tyranny on the reader's experience: there is a life in the novel which comes from within. ~ Ian Gregor

Crazy people love their Kindles. ~ Dermot Davis

…let us point out precisely the difficulties of empiricism as a theory of knowledge. First, it begins with two fixed, unchangeable ultimates--mind and matter. Second, it asserts that knowledge is the agreement of ideas with each other, in which case we are not dealing with nature or things at all, and consequently, have left out one of our ultimates. Third, it then asserts (for it is essential that knowledge should somehow or other be connected with things) that knowledge consists in the agreement between an idea and a thing; and in this case we can never tell when the agreement takes place; and furthermore, it is impossible for ideas and things to disagree, for, according to the theory, ideas are copies of things. This means that empiricism can not account for the fact of error. Every theory of knowledge must make a place for error, for, as is evident, error seems to be as industrious as truth.
Consequently, if knowledge actually does take place, if there is such an activity, thing, or relation as knowledge, empiricism fails to give an account of it which is free from contradictions. The moral is, as the stories in our school readers say, don't begin with fixed things, for they beguileth one into inconsistencies. ~ Holly Estil Cunningham

I sincerely believe that the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic; not a cold analytical type of criticism, which, claiming to explain everything, is devoid of hatred and love, and deliberately rids itself of any trace of feeling, but, since a fine painting is nature reflected by an artist, the best critical study, I repeat, will be the one that is that painting reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind. Thus the best accounts of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy ... But that type of criticism is destined for books of poetry and for readers of poetry. As to criticism proper, I hope philosophers will understand what I am about to say: to be in focus, in other words to justify itself, criticism must be partial, passionate, political, that is to say it must adopt an exclusive point of view, provided always the one adopted opens up the widest horizons. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Books fashion nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence. ~ Fay Weldon

My favorite albums are really short. ~ Thomas Mars

Dear Ava,

I know you hate this sort of thing, so I'll be brief. Today is not your favorite day. It's cursed apparently, for good reason. But if you let me, I promise to change that. I'll make every day your favorite day. You'll be my favorite person, and I'll be yours (if you'll have me). I've told you a hundred times I love you, and I'd wait forever for you to say it back. Don't make me. Please say you feel the same.

But tell me tomorrow, since anything that starts today is doomed.

Yours,

Luke ~ Ellery A. Kane

Charles Darwin [is my personal favorite Fellow of the Royal Society]. I suppose as a physical scientist I ought to have chosen Newton. He would have won hands down in an IQ test, but if you ask who was the most attractive personality then Darwin is the one you'd wish to meet. Newton was solitary and reclusive, even vain and vindictive in his later years when he was president of the society. ~ Martin Rees

To me, there's nothing worse than going to a concert and you're so looking forward to hearing your favorite song and they never play it. You're gutted. ~ Dido Armstrong

I can't help but recall, at this point, a horribly elitist but very droll remark by one of my favorite writers, the American "critic of the seven arts", James Huneker, in his scintillating biography of Frédéric Chopin, on the subject of Chopin's étude Op. 25, No. 11 in A minor, which for me, and for Huneker, is one of the most stirring and most sublime pieces of music ever written: "Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid it."

"Small-souled men"?! Whew! Does that phrase ever run against the grain of American democracy! And yet, leaving aside its offensive, archaic sexism (a crime I, too, commit in GEB, to my great regret), I would suggest that it is only because we all tacitly do believe in something like Hueneker's' shocking distinction that most of us are willing to eat animals of one sort or another, to smash flies, swat mosquitos, fight bacteria with antibiotics, and so forth. We generally concur that "men" such as a cow, a turkey, a frog, and a fish all possess some spark of consciousness, some kind of primitive "soul" but by God, it's a good deal smaller than ours is - and that, no more and no less, is why we "men" feel that we have the perfect right to extinguish the dim lights in the heads of these fractionally-souled beasts and to gobble down their once warm and wiggling, now chilled and stilled protoplasm with limitless gusto, and not feel a trace of guilt while doing so. ~ Douglas R. Hofstadter

[I] browsed far outside science in my reading and attended public lectures - Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Huxley, and Shaw being my favorite speakers. ~ Raymond Cattell

Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhecknikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing. ~ Roberto Bolano

Writing is a conduit. It opens up a passageway into the past. Not just for the writer, but for the reader too. Both readers and writer are linked by the commonality of human experience. ~ Lang Leav

My favorite saying is, 'If it's too loud, turn it up.' ~ Tori Amos

Ostrich is a very lean meat. Bison is a very lean meat. Chicken is a very lean meat. Notice something about my favorite meats? ~ Arlo Guthrie

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing. And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough. ~ Lauren F. Winner

My favorite hobby is cooking and eating. There is nothing i can do well if i have not eaten well. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

My two favorite things about being a pro player are Sunday afternoons being able to excite many fans and the money because I get to treat my family and friends and myself to nice things. ~ Dante Hall

My favorite animal is a polar bear. They're going extinct, and I really don't want that to happen. ~ Quvenzhane Wallis

Read over your existing business plan like you read the menu at your favorite restaurant. ~ Darren L Johnson

A favorite cast? Lisa Kudrow, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, and my wife. ~ William H. Macy

For a bookworm like Mother, a Brontë novel sister was better than a biological one. ~ Eileen Favorite

Raindrops on roses and girls in white dresses and sleeping with roaches and taking best guesses and shade of the sheets and before all the stains and a few more of your least favorite things... ~ Addi Booth

Lily Owens: If your favorite color is blue, why did you paint the house pink?
August Boatwright: [chuckles] That was May's doing. When we went to the paint shop, she latched on to a color called, "Caribbean Pink." She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish Flamenco. I personally thought it was the tackiest color I had ever seen, but I figured if it could lift May's heart, it was good enough to live in.
Lily Owens: That was awfully nice of you.
August Boatwright: Well, I don't know. Some things in life, like the color of a house, don't really matter. But lifting someone's heart? Now, that matters. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

It might surprise you to know that the missionary position is most women's favorite position. Missionary may at first glance seem boring, but it is also one of the most versatile positions. There are endless ways to modify it and take it to new levels. ~ Elle Chase

San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the world. ~ Rosalynn Carter

Imagine you are trying to lose weight and attempting to concentrate on writing an article, but there is a bowl with your favorite chocolate cookies in your field of vision, a permanent immoral offer. If we are capable of rejecting such offers or to postpone them into the future, then we can also concentrate on that which we currently want to do. ~ Thomas Metzinger

I'm pretty quick to delete something off of my phone if it's become obsolete. And things like RSS readers have made life easier - all of the headlines are going to be related to a topic I'm interested in. ~ Rich Sommer

All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone. ~ Alberto Manguel

Ron was always my favorite character, because I feel like I relate to him, like we've both got red hair, we both like sweets, we've both got lots of brothers and sisters. ~ Rupert Grint

I never go to the monitor. I just look at the camera monitor and my favorite part of all of the directing, except for the writing and editing of it, is right when we're rolling and they do lines and I'll say "Try this, try this, try this." ~ Will Gluck

The ocean is the lifeblood of our world. If we were to lose our fish that we appreciate so much by overfishing; or if we were to lose some of our favorite beaches to overbuilding and pollution, then how would we feel? It's become a case of not knowing what you've got until it's gone. ~ Aaron Peirsol

The llama was wearing a bridle with a rope attached where you might expect to find reins. A greeting card was hanging from his neck:
'Hola Como se llama? Yo me llamo C. Llama.'
During his preschool years, Clay's favorite cartoon had featured a Spanish-speaking boy naturalist who was always saving animals with his girl cousin, and Clay still knew enough of the language to translate:
'Hello. How do you call yourself? I call myself Como C. Llama.'
The llama's name is What is your name? ~ Pseudonymous Bosch

The men toasted their bottles, as they did when Mouse was mentioned. The part of their tattoo that no longer existed. The man had died on the job, protecting Blake because he was loyal to Beckett.
"And ... " Cole shot Beckett a look.
"You're unofficially known as Sparkles and Jesus." Beckett squinted as Cole pretended to be offended.
"I think it's only fair if we give you a nickname, Blake?" Cole asked.
Blake stood and added a log to the fire. It'd been burning steady since right after dinner. Being with his brothers like this was Beckett's favorite. It his wildest dreams he never pictured getting to sit with them in a Blake's backyard. ~ Debra Anastasia

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets. ~ Rita Dove