What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

--Logan Pearsall Smith

 Helen Lois Schultz, nee Jacobs

   A very special person whose greatest joy was giving of herself. 
   She is fondly remembered as a most gracious, devoted and special
   wife, mother, grandmother, friend and for correcting everyone's
   grammar.  Does she lay here or lie here?

                         -Epitaph in Los Angeles Cemetery
                          Reported by Chris Bui in the
                          December 2006 Reader's Digest

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. 
                                      John Barth

"Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending." --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."

Richard Bach

Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant.
It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of
interest.

-- Georgia O’Keeffe

"The way I start writing is always the same. I sit down at my typewriter and start typing. I start to babble, sometimes starting in the middle of the story and usually fairly quickly I see how it's going to start. It just starts shaping itself on the typewriter." --Cynthia Gorney

Attached Link: Raven Smith

Only when you crave beauty to be disregarded, will you not envy the beauty observed.  ~Raven Smith

Attached Link: Raven Smith

Victim mentality is like your standing in a fire surrounded by people with empty cups and you're the one with the cup full of water.  ~Raven Smith

"There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, 'Yes, I've got dreams, of course, I've got dreams.' Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up, and say, 'How good or how bad am I?' That's where courage comes in."

• Erma Bombeck

"Remember, life is simpler when you plow around the stump."

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"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."

     --  James Joyce

"[I]n real life, a spider doesn't spin words in her web…but real life is only one kind of life -- there is also the life of the imagination. And although my stories are imaginary, I like to think that there is some truth in them, too -- truth about the way people and animals feel and think and act." – Charlotte's Web's E.B. White, in a letter to a young reader

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule." – Stephen King

"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else."

• Erma Bombeck

"We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our
doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the
madness of art."

— Henry James