The Land Of Stories Quotes

My most educated analysis, with all means of science and technology in mind, is that it's magic," Alex said. "There's no other possible explanation!" -Alex Bailey, The Land of Stories; The Wishing Spell ~ Chris Colfer The Land Of Stories

But anyone can write, right?'" Conner asked. "I mean, that's why authors get judged so harshly, isn't it? Because technically everyone could do it if they wanted to."
"Just because anyone can do something doesn't mean everyone should," Mrs. Peters said. "Besides, anyone with an Internet connection feels they have the credentials to critique or belittle anything these days. ~ Chris Colfer

Anyone can have a once-upon-a-time or a happily-ever-after, but it's the journey between that makes the story worth telling. ~ Chris Colfer

Should we call her?Maybe we should give her a RING to see where she is? Get it? Get it?
-Conner Bailey ~ Chris Colfer

Intelligence is not a competition," she said. "There is plenty to go around, and there are many ways it can be demonstrated. ~ Chris Colfer

The test of an invention is the power of an inventor to push it through in the face of staunch-not opposition, but indifference-in society. ~ Edwin Land

Surrounded by death and decay
rotting from bones to bones,
my flesh lays bare the blubbery fat,
traverse the land i shall,
finding babies to devour,
performing rituals of ancient magic,
I, the witch of yore…
Beware! i wander these places with guile and pure vice,
All of you shall be my victims,
I, the witch of yore,
eternal dweller of internet message boards. ~ Daphne Fissel

He motions to the glue brush. "Can I have some?"
I start to grab it so I can pass it to him. He reaches for it at the same time. Our fingers touch, and the moment they do the fluorescent lights overhead flicker and then fizzle out.
Everyone moans, even though we can all still see. There's enough light from the outside filtering in, just not enough for us to really focus on the finer details.
Nick's fingers stroke mine lightly, so lightly that I'm almost not sure the touch is real. My insides flicker like the art room lights. They do not, however, fizzle. I turn my head to look him in the eye.
He leans over and whispers, "It will be hard to be just your friend."
The lights come back on.
"Just a little brownout." The art teacher smiles and holds out her arms. "Welcome to Maine, Zara. Land of a million power failures."
Nick's breath touches my ear. "I heard you didn't drive to school. I'll bring you home after cross-country,okay?"
"Okay," I say, trying to be all calm, but what I really want to do is leap up and do a happy dance all over the art room. Nick is driving me home. ~ Carrie Jones

He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others. ~ Rachel Joyce

The recurrence of a phenomenon like [Thomas] Edison is not very likely. The profound change of conditions and the ever increasing necessity of theoretical training would seem to make it impossible. He will occupy a unique and exalted position in the history of his native land, which might well be proud of his great genius and undying achievements in the interest of humanity. ~ Nikola Tesla

In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed, the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land. ~ David Abram

The conquest of the outskirts of the atmosphere, and eventually space, is a revolutionary event, comparable only to the transition of the aquatic animals to the land in geologic times. ~ Hubertus Strughold

A whole slew of them lived outside Immita on a big piece of trailer-dotted land everyone called Ducktown, and they were all cousins and brothers and aunts with one another so many times over that it was hard to tell who was exactly related and how. Growing up, I'd had six or so in school right around my grade, but I was a sophomore now, and only one was left. Either the rest had failed so many times I'd left them behind by middle school or they had plain dropped out. OMG ~ Joshilyn Jackson

Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely. ~ Iain Pears

I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies. ~ Michael Parenti

The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land. ~ Abraham Lincoln

The ocean makes up roughly 70% of the planet; living on land, we fail to recognize the importance of our ocean and the marine life that inhabit it. Ocean acidification is making phytoplankton toxic, which is bad news for the organisms that depend on them as a source of food and oxygen. Phytoplankton generates a large portion of the world's O2. If they're out of balance, the rest of life on Earth is going to be out of balance. ~ Joseph P. Kauffman

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food ~ Albert Allen Bartlett

All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. ~ Cormac McCarthy

America seemed like a place for honest people. The United States of America. The land of the free and the home of the brave. The most righteous, politically correct and awesomest country in the world.
It even says "in god we trust" on the dollar bills.
God bless America. ~ Carlito Sofer, Nik Krasno

Invitation to Eternity

Say, wilt thou go with me, sweet maid,
Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me
Through the valley-depths of shade,
Of bright and dark obscurity;
Where the path has lost its way,
Where the sun forgets the day,
Where there's nor light nor life to see,
Sweet maiden, wilt thou go with me?

Where stones will turn to flooding streams,
Where plains will rise like ocean's waves,
Where life will fade like visioned dreams
And darkness darken into caves,
Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me
Through this sad non-identity
Where parents live and are forgot,
And sisters live and know us not?

Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me
In this strange death of life to be,
To live in death and be the same,
Without this life or home or name,
At once to be and not to be -
That was and is not - yet to see
Things pass like shadows, and the sky
Above, below, around us lie?

The land of shadows wilt thou trace,
Nor look nor know each other's face;
The present marred with reason gone,
And past and present both as one?
Say, maiden, can thy life be led
To join the living and the dead?
Then trace thy footsteps on with me:
We are wed to one eternity. ~ John Clare

When I reflect that one man, armed only with his own physical and moral resources, was able to cause this land of Canaan to spring from the wasteland, I am convinced that in spite of everything, humanity is admirable. But when I compute the unfailing greatness of spirit and the tenacity of benevolence that it must have taken to achieve this result, I am taken with an immense respect for that old and unlearned peasant who was able to complete a work worthy of God. ~ Jean Giono

Outside the street's on fire In a real death waltz Between what's flesh and fantasy And the poets down here Don't write nothin at all They just stand back and let it all be And in the quick of the night They reach for their moment And try to make an honest stand But they wind up wounded Not even dead Tonight in Jungle Land. - Bruce Springsteen ~ Stephen King

When Nature gives a gorgeous rose, Or yields the simplest fern, She writes this motto on the leaves, "To whom it may concern!" And so it is the poet comes And revels in her bowers, And, though another hold the land, Is owner of the flowers. ~ John Godfrey Saxe

He found her not even a block away from the house, sitting on a curb.
As he approached, he saw her wiping her face with her forearm.
Sabine was...crying? "What are you doing out here, cwena?" Over the past week, Rydstrom had been pleased when she'd worried about him, and gratified when she'd felt the sting of jealousy. Was he a terrible man to hope she was crying about him?
She glared at him with her bottom lip quivering, allowing him to see her like this instead of using a mask. "I d-don't have anywhere else to g-go." Another swipe of her forearm over her eyes. "Lanthe's gone, and I c-can't get to her for six days. And I'm in a strange t-town and land, and Vrekeners are everywhere."
Sabine hadn't even mentioned what they'd just gone through-
"And you br-broke up with me!" she said, her tears falling faster. "Is that supposed to make me happy?"
"Come inside, Sabine."
"No! You t-told me not to." She sniffled, "You don't want me at your house."
He swooped her up in his arms. "Will you shut up?" With his free hand, he brushed her tears. "I made it ten minutes before I came after you. ~ Kresley Cole

A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. ~ John Steinbeck

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #10: WHEN VISITING A FOREIGN LAND, IT IS ALWAYS WISE TO OBSERVE AND ABIDE BY THE CUSTOMS OF THE LOCAL CULTURE. UNLESS THEY'RE TRYING TO EAT YOU. ~ Mark Frost

In the first place, he is a gentleman," continued Violet. "Then he is a man of spirit. And then he has not too much spirit; - not that kind of spirit which makes some men think that they are the finest things going. His manners are perfect; - not Chesterfieldian, and yet never offensive. He never browbeats any one, and never toadies any one. He knows how to live easily with men of all ranks, without any appearance of claiming a special status for himself. If he were made Archbishop of Canterbury to-morrow, I believe he would settle down into the place of the first subject in the land without arrogance, and without false shame. ~ Anthony Trollope

Take me to Happy Birthday Land. It's open 364 days of the year, and the one day of the year it's closed for cleaning happens to be my birthday. ~ Jarod Kintz

His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others - Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She'd be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they'd be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They'd come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they'd walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man's-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they'd simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself. ~ Libba Bray

I read Mailer's Ancient Evenings with great interest because I was interested in ... the seven souls structure, which was very helpful to me in Western Lands. And also in Place of Dead Roads. So that's Mailer. ~ William S. Burroughs

The tree is burning on the autumn noon
That builds each year the leaf and bark again.
Though frost will strip it raw and barren soon,
The rounding season will restore and mend.

Yet people are not mended, but go on,
Accumulating memory and love.
And so the wood we used to know is gone,
Because the years have taught us that we move.

We have moved on, the Tamburlaines of then,
To different Asias of our plundering.
And though we sorrow not to know again
A land or face we loved, yet we are king.

The young are never robbed of innocence
But given gold of love and memory.
We live in wealth whose bounds exceed our sense,
And when we die are full of memory.

-from "September Ode ~ Donald Hall

There are promises of protection in the Word of Wisdom. The Lord's word of wisdom commanding abstinence from a worldly "king's portion" of tobacco, tea and coffee, and alcoholic beverages that are habit-forming, and which counsels the simple diet of fruits, grains, and vegetables in season, with meats used sparingly, has been given you as a revelation of God's great law of health. It stands today as a challenge to a world surfeited with things condemned as unclean and unfit for the human body.

If you have faith as the youthful Daniel and his brethren and purpose in your hearts that you will not defile yourselves with "king's meat and wine," even though you may be two thousand miles east of the Suez Canal, your faith will have the reward of hidden treasures of knowledge, of strong bodies that can "run and not be weary and walk and not faint." If by faith in this great law, you refrain from the use of food and drink harmful to your bodies, you will not become a ready prey to scourges that shall sweep the land, as in the days of the people of Moses in Egypt, bringing death to every household that has not heeded the commandments of God. ~ Harold B. Lee

[...] It is not humanity that will tear the land asunder, but a certain inhumanity born from ingratitude and the explosion of souls_ in the usual name of progress. ~ Anouar Majid

The underlying attitude comes bursting out of his words: He believes his wife is keeping something of his away from him when she doesn't want intimate contact. He sees sexual rights to a woman as akin to mineral rights to land - and he owns them. ~ Lundy Bancroft

If you have someone you think is the one, take them and travel around the world. Buy a plane ticket for the two of you to travel all over the world, to places that are hard to reach and hard to get out of. And when you land at JFK and you're still in love with that person, get married. ~ Bill Murray