Deedy Quotes & Sayings

What's life without a few dragons? — J.K. Rowling

Listen to great storytellers; slowly, you will learn about voice, timing, tension, structure, climax - all the things you need to tell stories that will capture the imagination of your audience. — Carmen Agra Deedy

Read, read, read. Read good books. You will strengthen your understanding of story. Your vocabulary will be the richer for it. — Carmen Agra Deedy

But we should also not forget the difference between what first motivated me and the work that is the result. — Anselm Kiefer

The hardest part is making the time to write. Not finding the time to write, mind you. Making. — Carmen Agra Deedy

If you tell stories you love, you will never tell them with indifference - take it to the bank. — Carmen Agra Deedy

Artificial intelligence will never be a match for natural stupidity. — Joseph Addison

Because there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded, nor a people so small they cannot offer mighty comfort. — Carmen Agra Deedy

The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort. Tonight do I lie down in the high fields with Dirk Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry's headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things. A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I'm waiting until I know how I will be changed."
"You never know how things will change you," Kit said.
"If you don't, you have not waited to find out. — Kij Johnson

In those first hours after he drowned, when the catastrophe was still confined to Calabash beach, and to Jake, Joe and me, its speed was impossible to reconcile with its scale. Nothing so big could happen this fast; it defied the laws of physics, it could not be true. Death is too much for the mind to register in a matter of minutes; the incalculable magnitude can only be absorbed by increment, day by day. As each day allows a new glimpse of its immensity, and the aftershock extends beyond the beach to reach hundreds of people all over the world, my comprehension slowly expands until its dimensions resemble a more accurate impression of the truth. But the bigger his death grows, the more inconceivable it becomes. It feels like an ambitious piece of performance art; a work of fiction, not real life. How strange that the truth of my own situation should be so much clearer to everybody else. — Decca Aitkenhead

I have been ineluctably drawn to libraries ever since I entered that sanctum sanctorum. It was a place of quietude. In a world where things go beep and ding and ring, where you've got mail and you've got messages, when I enter a library, I feel that I am still entering a temple. — Carmen Agra Deedy

I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters' school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening. — Carmen Agra Deedy

The trail should be enjoyed, and when joy is difficult to achieve, personal growth should become the focus. Still, — Zach Davis

I was wifing on him so hard my ovaries were wondering if it was baby time. I — Jasinda Wilder

You're more likely to finish a book you enjoy, than one that feels like literary drudgery. — Carmen Agra Deedy

I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there. — Arthur Rimbaud

Whatever we perceive as good in the world has always endured, and it always will. — Carmen Agra Deedy

If one mouse is a spark ... then ten thousand are a conflagration. — Carmen Agra Deedy

I find that it takes a lot of years of living, and many more of reckoning, to come up with one worthwhile paragraph. And when a deadline looms, prayer doesn't hurt, either. — Carmen Agra Deedy

Owner Red McCombs has a track record for dumping teams - he owned both the NBA's Spurs and Nuggets at various times - and his stadium situation just isn't going to get resolved in the Twin Cities. Even some of his fellow owners have him No. 1 on the relocation list. I think Red might sell, ... He's been known to sell before. — Bud Adams

INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act. — Ambrose Bierce

Hearty faith is indispensable for man, because the light of our intellect is very limited, and cannot contain much mental light, while the Lord our God is Infinite Light, and the world is an abyss of His omnipotence and wisdom, whilst in us there is only, so to say, a drop of His power and wisdom, because only so much, and not more, can be contained of them in our perishable flesh. — John Of Kronstadt

Reading isn't about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You're trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I'm reading. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Listening to others does not mean you should sound like them; find your own voice by telling stories as authentically as possible. — Carmen Agra Deedy

I cannot always write at the same time, in the same place. I work, travel and have a vigorous family life. If I'm stranded in an airport lobby - I write. If I have to wait in a doctor's office - I write. If I have a morning or evening to myself - I write. — Carmen Agra Deedy

A semantic definition of a particular set of command types, then, is a rule for constructing, for any command of one of these types, a verification condition on the antecedents and consequents. — Robert W. Floyd

There are constant cycles in history. There is loss, but it is always followed by regeneration. The tales of our elders who remember such cycles are very important to us now. — Carmen Agra Deedy

It is not enough to say you are sorry. You must utterly own the terrible thing you have done. You must cast no blame on the one you have injured. Rather, accept every molecule of the responsibility, even if reason and self-preservation scream against it. Then, and only then, will the words 'I am sorry' have meaning. — Carmen Agra Deedy

There isn't much to say. I haven't been at all deedy. — Ivy Compton-Burnett