Seventeen Hoshi Quotes & Sayings

Finally I had made that necessary imaginative leap - which is a real necessity, since most of us writers can't be out there living like crazy all the time. These days, very few are the writers whose book jackets list things like bush pilot, big game hunter, or exotic dancer. No, more often we are English teachers. We have children, we have mortgages, we have bills to pay. So we have to stop writing strictly about what we know, which is what they always told us to do in creative writing classes. Instead, we have to write about what we can learn, and what we can imagine, and thus we come to experience that great pleasure Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, I write because I want more than one life. — Lee Smith

Baby, you've got enough strength and tenacity to take
down drug dealers. You'll be fine. — Katie McGarry

O Malalai of Maiwand, Rise once more to make Pashtuns understand the song of honor, Your poetic words turn worlds around, I beg you, rise again My father told the story of Malalai to anyone who came to our house. I loved hearing the story and the songs my father sang to me, and the way my name floated on the wind when people called it. — Malala Yousafzai

When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant "government of the people" but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term "people" to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America's problem is not its betrayal of "government of the people," but the means by which "the people" acquired their names. This — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, "I am just going outside and may be some time." The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins. — Annie Dillard

The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator. — Ben Jonson

Being taken for granted is an unpleasant but sincere form of praise. Ironically, the more reliable you are, and the less you complain, the more likely you are to be taken for granted. — Gretchen Rubin

Prolonged travel in the alternate world of books can also make a reader more prone to fantasy thinking and estranged from his or her "real" life. — Maureen Corrigan

If God is your co-pilot, swap seats! — James W. Moore

I hear that melting-pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven't melted. — Jesse Jackson

The animal is ignorant of the fact that he knows. The man is aware of the fact that he is ignorant. — Victor Hugo

It's going to be fun to watch and see how long the meek can keep the earth once they inherit it. — Kin Hubbard

One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox. — Wendell Berry