Awesome Quotations from July-Dec 2012

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
Maya Angelou

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.
Douglas Adams

The person who has it in his mind that he will write to engineer better human beings is a despot before he writes the first line.
Richard Bausch

Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.
Charlie Brooker

Do you think it's possible to discuss politics without preaching?
Steven Brust

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Octavia Butler

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
Albert Camus

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn't know how to read.
Benjamin Franklin

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
Stephen Fry

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way
Caroline Gordon

I don't want to force my politics on my readers.
John Grisham

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.
James Norman Hall

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.  This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
Samuel Johnson

I try not to spend too much time on partisan politics. Life's too short for that. I don't really believe that there have been many human problems solved by politics.
Dean Koontz

The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.
George McGovern

Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more
Donald Miller

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw

The lack of money is the root of all evil.
Mark Twain

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
Mark Twain

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time
Edwin Whipple