“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”

– Kurt Vonnegut

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

- EB White

“Latimer Springfield was a rather cheerless, oldish young man, who went into politics somewhat in the spirit in which other people might go into half-mourning.”

- Saki, “The Lull”

“Before we are citizens, he thought, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty.”

- Orson Scott Card
Enchanted

“The dew lay heavy and thick upon the grass by the roadside, and over the miles of network that the spiders had woven from blossom to blossom of the heather.  The dew is the Sun’s breakfast; but he was barely up yet, and had not eaten it, and the world felt anything but warm.” 

Juliana Horatia Ewing

The Brownies & Other Tales

Upon seeing an evil ancient god:

“I don’t know how to describe it — it’s like the devil, only I always pictures the devil as nicer.”

Daniel Pinkwater
The Neddiad ch. 67

I learned a new word from Daniel Pinkwater’s The Neddiad:

“Melanistic” – adj. referring to animals that have an unusual amount of melanin in the skin tissue, making them darker than normal

“The first thing I saw was an African lion, about one foot from my nose. I jumped … It only took a second to realize that it was stuffed and not alive — but you can go through quite a number of emotion in one second. The emotion I settled on was that it was an extremely neat thing.”

Daniel Pinkwater
The Neddiad ch. 34

“Of course, I had already had a rundown on the members of my class from my friend Seamus. No bullies, no snitches, no crybabies, no showoffs — a pretty good bunch, he thought.”

Daniel Pinkwater
The Neddiad ch. 30

“If I had to sum up my first impression of Los Angeles in a few words, I would say it’s a perfect combination of glamorous and crummy.”

Daniel Pinkwater
The Neddiad ch. 22