#commonplace quotes

[kor-ee-an-door]

From Anne Fadiman's "Words On A Flyleaf" in Ex Libris Confessions of a Common Reader.

[ladytemeraire]

“Don’t tell me every revolution is peaceful. Revolutions rely on the tireless work of faceless masses whose lives mean so little individually that their names weren’t known to their movements even when alive. There is no bloodless revolution, only necessary revolution, when a system becomes so deeply broken that you can’t affect change from the inside. When the system itself has become calcified so permanently that change is not possible... that is when the knives come out.”

- Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade, which remains the single most breathtaking and thought-provoking book I’ve read all year.

[ladytemeraire]

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Allen Saunders

[ladytemeraire]

Your pen is not a wand, it's just a tool. It's you who brings the magic to the page.

Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method

[ladytemeraire]

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the painter who dares and who has broken the spell of "you can't" once and for all.

Vincent van Gogh

[ladytemeraire]

The amount of money I would pay for people to stop fucking up grammar is only slightly lower than the amount I'd give to ensure I never have grammatical errors in the statements I make calling others out on their grammatical errors.

Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy

[ladytemeraire]

Everyone wants to give a writer the perfect notebook. Over the years I’ve acquired stacks: One is leather, a rope of Rapunzel’s hair braids its spine. Another, tree-friendly, its pages reincarnated from diaries of poets who now sit in cubicles. One is small and black like a funeral dress, its pages lined like the hands of a widow. There’s even a furry blue one that looks like a shag rug or a monster that would hide under it— and I wonder why? For every blown out candle, every Mazel Tov, every turn of the tassel, you gift-wrap what a writer dreads most: blank pages. It’s never a notebook we need. If we have a story to tell, an idea carbonating past the brim of us, we will write it on our arms, thighs, any bare meadow of skin. In the absence of pens, we will repeat our lines deliriously like the telephone number of a parting stranger until we become the craziest one on the subway.

Megan Falley, “If You Really Love A Writer”

[gortaithe]

Some quotes I’ve found in books I’ve been reading