John Updike: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? It is even possible to dislike our old selves, those disposable ancestors of ours. For instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot: without his frantic ambition and insecurity I would not be sitting on (as my present home was named by others) Haven Hill.

--John Updike

Neil Gaiman: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

"All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories."
- NEIL GAIMAN

Lionel Shriver: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

“Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.”

― Lionel Shriver

Camille Paglia: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

Subversion requires limits to violate. --Camille Paglia

T. H. White: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

“We cannot build the future by avenging the past.”

― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Francois de la Rochefoucauld: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

"Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary of the talkers who talk."
- FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Charles Schulz: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

“Why can't we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn't work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos.”
― Charles M. Schulz