Maurice Sendak

A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.

Let the wild rumpus star!

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

Oh, please don't go—we'll eat you up—we love you so!

I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.

I'll eat you up I love you so.

And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

Rhonda Byrne

Be grateful for what you have now. As you begin to think about all the things in your life you are grateful for, you will be amazed at the never ending thoughts that come back to you of more things to be grateful for. You have to make a start, and then the law of attraction will receive those grateful thoughts and give you more just like them.

There is no such thing as a hopeless situation. Every single circumstances of your life can change! 

There is a truth deep down inside of you that has been waiting for you to discover it, and that truth is this: you deserve all good things life has to offer.

You become what you think about most.. But you also attract what you think about most.

Your power is in your thoughts, so stay awake. In other words, remember to remember.

The truth is that the universe has been answering you all of your life, but you cannot receive the answers unless you are awake.

Desmond Morris

We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species.

I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.

Biologically speaking, if something bites you, it is more likely to be female.

In little more than a single century from 1820 to 19450, no less than fifty-nine million human animals were killed in inter-group clashes of one sort or another.... We describe these killings as men behaving "like animals," but if we could find a wild animal that showed signs of acting this way, it would be more precise to describe it as behaving like men.

We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels, but in reality we are rising apes.

A belief in the validity of the acquisition of knowledge and a scientific understanding of the world we live in, the creation and appreciation of aesthetic phenomena in all their many forms, and the broadening and deepening of our range of experiences in day-to-day living, is rapidly becoming the 'religion' of our time.

Irving Stone

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.

Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.

One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.

It's so easy to love. The only hard thing is to be loved.

How difficult it is to be simple.

Normal people do not create art.

To try to understand another human being, to grapple for his ultimate depths, that is the most dangerous of human endeavors.

There's no love without pain.

Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.

Loneliness is a kind of prison.

You cannot be the good all the time — sometimes it is necessary to get angry.

Robert James Waller

Once a person knows a kiss and a kind word, you can't blame him for never wanting to live without them again.

The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it's been broken into a million pieces.

In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.

The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out but I'm glad I had them.

It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.

Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.

The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.

Xueqin Cao

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real where the unreal's real.

The cunning waste their pains;
The wise men vex their brains;
But the simpleton, who seeks no gains,
With belly full, he wanders free
As drifting boat upon the sea.

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true. Real becomes Not-Real when the Unreal's Real.

When grief for fiction’s idle wordsNo remedy but love Can make the lovesick well; Only the hand that tied the knot Can loose the tiger’s bell.

More real than human life appears, Reflect that life itself’s a dream And do not mock the reader’s tears.

Any doctor will do in an emergency.

Better by far the destiny of plant or stone, bereft of knowledge and consciousness, but blessed at least with purity and peace of mind!

The mighty sturgeon has his pool; The stork upon the dam makes his habitation. Fish in scaly armour, Birds in serried plumes, find protection. In my distress I question that inscrutable expanse: O bowels of earth! O boundless sky! Will ye not hearken to my cry? Above, the twinkling Milky Way; The air cold, Slanting moonlight, The water-clock sunk past midnight. My restless heart grieves still.

Mikhail Bulgakov

But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings.
Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid.

Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.

You should never ask anyone for anything. Never- and especially from those who are more powerful than yourself.

Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!

But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.

Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.

Bernardine Evaristo 

Be a person with knowledge not just opinions.

Gender is one of the biggest lies of our civilization.

Privilege is about context and circumstance.

Women who miraculously spend their working day wearing bondage-tight skirts and vertiginous, destabilizing heels which make their feet look bound the erogenous zones of crushed muscles and cramped bones, encased in upmarket strippers’ heels and if she has to cripple herself to signal her education, talent, intellect, skills and leadership potential then so be it.

She didn’t tell them she’d taken her father for granted and carried her blinkered, self-righteous perspective of him from childhood through to his death, when in fact he’d done nothing wrong except fail to live up to her feminist expectations of him.

Nalo Hopkinson

Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.

The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humour, too.

My friend Ian Hagemann, a regular at Wiscon, once said on a panel that when he reads science fiction futures that are full of white people and no one else, he wonders when the race war happened that wiped out the majority of the human race, and why the writer hasn’t mentioned such an important plot point.

How do I know anything? How is it that my arms stretched out in front of me are so pale? How to I even know that they should be brown like riverbank mud, as they were when I was many goddesses with many worshippers, ruling in lands on the other side of a great, salty ocean? I used to be many, but now we are one, all squeezed together, many necks in one coffle.

You folk are so finicky about time, living it in straight lines like that.

Suck all the juice this life will give!

Bruce Sterling

Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, “Woo the muse of the odd.” You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.

You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.

A dagger is the noble weapon of Brutus. Everyone understands that tyrants fall to daggers. A bomb is a sordid modern device with many complex working parts. Only engineers understand bombs.