From Shakespeare

"For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do, that dares love attempt."
Romeo and Juliet

From Twain

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

Twain, 1939

From "Moonshine Murder"

Okay, I've decided I need to post a little something from my current project, a young adult Historical Fiction novel, "Moonshine Murder". This comes from the end of chapter 14:

"The breeze wrestled the leaves on the Cottonwood. Above the branches, scattered clouds cast opaque shades in the sky. The wind danced. The deep blue of twilight descended into the stirred waters of the horizon."

From Flannery O'Connor

"The writer is only free when he can tell the reader to go jump in the lake....You want, of course, to get what you have to show across to him, but whether he likes it or not is no concern of the writer."

Flannery O'Connor

On Words

"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1918)

From Faulkner

"Man will endure because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things."

William Faulkner

From Twain

"My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water."

Twain

From John Adams on Reading

"I read my eyes out and can't read half enough...The more one reads the more one sees we have to read."
John Adams, 1794.

From Hemingway

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."

Ernest Hemingway, "Old Newsman Writers," Esquire, December 1934, p.26.