Quotes About Inspiration

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

The Middle East, that seductive region where [Herman] Melville had hoped to rekindle his inspiration and revive his diminishing career, had proved an egregious disappointment. "The whole thing is half melancholy, half farcical," he groaned, "like all the rest of the world.

It looks like the future's really bright.

As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning's thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether or not I believe in God. In fact I am about to type, 'I do not believe in God', when the sky goes black as ink, there is a thunderclap and a huge crash of thunder and a downpour of epic proportions. I never do complete the sentence.

He suddenly appeared on the world's doorstep, inspiring pan-national awe and reconciliation--a liberal German Jew who clung to his Swiss citizenship and renounced violence.

I often found myself curled up at midday on a hard wooden bench, snoring lightly, drooling on the back of my hand, trying to sleep off my exuberance—and then waking to a headache and a bushel of horrible paragraphs. Admittedly

I'll keep these same photographs pinned to a wall above my desk as tiny parables.

If we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does, we could achieve factor 10, factor 100, maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use.

I want to be able to look back and say, 'I've done everything I can, and I was successful.' I don't want to look back and say I should have done this or that. I'd like to change things for the younger generation of swimmers coming along.

I think sometimes I guess you see records, say you want to get there and use that as motivation. In a way, it's kind of cool if there is a possibility to rewrite history and be up there with the greats of Olympic history.

You can't put a limit on aything. The more you dream, the father you get.

Nothing is impossible. With so many people saying it couldn't be done, all it takes is an imagination.

A writer is very much like the captain on a star ship facing the unknown. When you face the blank page and you have no idea where you're going. It can be terrifying, but it can also be the adventure of a lifetime.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you.

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

Somehow along my path, I devised a second way of divining God's will for me, which I'm sure isn't original. When I'm not certain what God would have me do, I reframe the question to, "what would love do?" Intellectually, equating God and love seems fair, and it has never led me astray or failed to translate.

the house had been set up by two countesses 'by divine inspiration, as it is piously believed', to preserve the respectability of women who couldn't marry, couldn't afford the 'dowry' needed to enter a convent and who were about 'to go begging or shamefully support themselves'. The beguinage allowed them to 'support and clothe themselves by suitable work, without shaming themselves or their friends'.

Perhaps each life has one sensational thought, if acted upon will bring great meaning.

What's real and what's not? People we meet in books--Holden Caulfield, Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Bilbo and Gandalf and Frodo-- can become more memorable, and more important to us than people with birth certificates and drivers' licenses. Characters spawned in an author's imagination find a home inside us. They make our lives richer. They become our best friends. They never disappoint. And they never die.

Michael Ray Taylor

Because of my father, we are that Shining City on a Hill.

I write about cats. Cats, when you read this, write about me. Be the change you want to see.