Alice Walker
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for?
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.
For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.
Look closely at the present you’re constructing. It should look like the future you are dreaming.
Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.
The great male writers of the European tradition, be it Proust, Tolstoy, Turgenev, deemed that those most inspiring to them existed in a white aristocracy. You read those books and you wouldn’t even know that people of colour existed in Europe. To each his own, and that was their choice. But I wanted to say: these lives, of women, and even of poor white people--these lives are worthy of literature. As Turgenev looked at the crumbling Russian empire, I look at these folks in a different crumbling empire and deemed that these are inspiring lives to an artist.
Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.
People who work hard often work too hard. . . . May we learn to honor the hammock, the siesta, the nap and the pause in all its forms.
Kara Walker
There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist.
Silhouettes are reductions, and racial stereotypes are also reductions of actual human beings.
A lot of my work has been about the unexpected—that kind of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time. That kind of dilemma—that push and pull—is the underlying turbulence that I bring to each of the pieces that I make.
David Foster Wallace
Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
Robert Penn Warren
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Booker T. Washington
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
Character is power.
Wendy Wasserstein
Go out there and do something remarkable. Don't live down to expectations.
Alan Watts
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Ursus Wehrli
I like to turn things upside down, to watch pictures and situations from another perspective.
Victor Weisskopf
In science we must always begin by asking questions, not giving answers. In this way, we contribute to the joy of insight. For science is the opposite of knowledge. Science is curiosity.
Carrie Mae Weems
Art is the one place we all turn to for solace.
Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.
I didn't know photography would take me to the places that it has taken me.
Simone Weil
There is nothing more comfortable than not thinking.
James Welch
I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal.
There is no dishonor in wisdom.
Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana.
I am definitely a storyteller, but probably not a traditional Storyteller.
Eudora Welty
No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
All serious daring starts from within.
Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.
The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
Valerie Wilson Wesley
Boredom is what you fight. Constant, ever-present boredom. So you learn to look forward to small things. Sunlight glimpsed through a cloud, an extra piece of pie or candy, good thread to sew your blouse, a ribbon to wear in your hair.
Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.
Dorothy West
To know how much there is to know is the beginning of learning to live.
Beauty is but skin deep, ugly to the bone. And when beauty fades away, ugly claims its own. Identity is not inherent. It is shaped by circumstance and sensitivity and resistance to self-pity.
There is no life that does not contribute to history.
I'm a writer. I don't cook and I don't clean.
Vivienne Westwood
You have a more interesting life if you wear impressive clothes.
I'm not trying to do something different, I'm trying to do the same thing but in a different way.
Buy less, choose well: that's the maxim. Quality not quantity. That's the most environmentally friendly thing you can do.
The best fashion accessory is a book.
Edith Wharton
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
Phillis Wheatley
The world is a severe schoolmaster.
E.B. White
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound.
A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to write will die without putting a word on paper.
Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom--he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.
Colson Whitehead
It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
Walt Whitman
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
I like the scientific spirit – the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine – it always keeps the way beyond open – always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake – after a wrong guess.
I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.
Either define the moment or the moment will define you.
This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Edna Gardner Whyte
I'll show you what a woman can do. I'll go across the country, I'll race to the moon . . . I'll never look back.
Kristen Wiig
If you’re creating anything at all, it’s really dangerous to care about what people think.
Richard Wilbur
One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable, not by falsehood but by clear, precise confrontation.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
There’s no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.
To sin in silence while others doth protest makes cowards out of men.
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own.
A weed is but an unloved flower.
Oscar Wilde
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
People are never so trivial as when they take themselves very seriously.
Thorton Wilder
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?
Nancy Willard
Sometimes questions are more important than answers.
I haven’t a clue how my story will end, but that’s all right. When you set out on a journey and night covers the road, that’s when you discover the stars.
We don’t really understand something until we have forgotten it.
If prayers worked, Hitler would have been stopped at the border of Poland by angels with swords of fire.
Sarah Williams
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
William Carlos Williams
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents.
In summer, the song sings itself.
We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.
It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
If they give you lined paper, write the other way.
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.
I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.
The only realism in art is of the imagination.
No ideas but in things.
To imitate nature involves the verb to do. To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly: Shakespeare's mirror is all that is needed for it. But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover in ourselves nature's active part.
Poetry is something quite different. Poetry has to do with the crystalization of the imagination . . .
The province of the poem is the world. When the sun rises, it rises in the poem and when it sets darkness comes down and the poem is dark.
Oprah Winfrey
The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance, and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.
Virginia Woolf
A writer must be able to distinguish one day's light from another’s.
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
Why are women . . . so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, lived like men . . .
I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgment dawns--the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."
Judith Wright
When not deeply engaged in creative activities, or numbed out by the TV, I felt empty. My heart hurt. I often felt hollow or as if I were some sort of wispy ghost, barely existing.
Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place.
Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.
Richard Wright
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
All literature is protest.
The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
William Wycherley
Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other.
Elinor Wylie
I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my inheritance, I suppose.
I bear a little more than I can bear.
W Quotations
