Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy.
Which would be at about shoulder height. Apparently, in Pada’s search for her path, the Saints needed to be sure that they had nothing important to say that lay toward either the ceiling or the floor, or she would render them mute.
Courage is nothing more than taking one step more than you think you can.
Anything designed to be inoffensive isn’t worth your time – life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.
I have never yet figured out what to do about good advice that you get, and that you know right away would help you, but that you cannot follow.
If you have dreams you want to pursue, the time is now. There is no perfect time, and there is no better time. There is only the time you lose while you’re making excuses.
Adventures are only interesting once you’ve lived to see the end of them. Before that, they are nothing but fear, and being too cold or too hot or too wet or too hungry, and getting hurt.
The definition of a writing career, is write a book, write another book, write another book.
This is writing. You cut out chunks of your own memories, rework them, bleed into them, breathe into the raw clay, and hope the creature lives.
The only place you will be accepted is the place you make for yourself.
Every writer has something to say, but those writers whose works endure have dared to say something about the things that frighten them, confuse them, challenge them, and occasionally delight them.
You must learn to face the fact, always, that you choose to do what you do, and that everything you do affects not only you but others.
If you don’t accept responsibility for your own actions then you are forever chained to a position of defense.
A voice speaks to each of us in the still silent places – a voice that tells us to stand, to have courage, to do what is right.
I would rather be right and die than be wrong and kill.
I had come to discover that “safe” was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let’s-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.
And let’s debunk one bit of writer myth while we’re here: Doing a seventeenth revision on a project does not make a writer an artist or move him above the writer hoi polloi any more than dressing entirely in black or wearing tweed jackets with leather elbow patches or big, black drover coats. These are all affectations, and smack of dilettantism. Real writers, and real artists, finish books and move on to the next project.
Console yourself not with the lie that your foe is weak, or stupid, or evil. Sometimes the enemy is worthy. Sometimes his cause is just. Sometimes both sides are right in their own ways-and in the hour that just causes collide, good men will rise up and leap into the fray, and the clash of their meeting will shake the heavens. And their blood will flow like rivers.
History is neither truth nor completeness. It is simply the best story people can string together at the time, out of whatever facts and snippets they might have on hand.