I have this theory.
Words are powerful. They stick inside of us as though magnetically connected to our souls. They help us wrap our heads around the world in all of its beauty and terror. They breathe inspiration into us. They are alive.
I started writing, because other author’s words compelled me to create my own.
Here is a list of the words that inspired me.
If you are a lover of words as well, I implore you to appreciate the beauty of these sentences composed by the greatest writers of all time.
1. “I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious and its words and stories so damning and brilliant... I am haunted by humans.”
- Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
2. “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
- Jack Kerouac, On The Road
3. "If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."
- Charles Bukowski, Factotum
4. “I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
5. “God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.”
- Aldous Huxley, The Genius and The Goddess
6. “She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
- J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew
7. “You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?”
- John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday
8. “To die, to sleep - To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub, For in this sleep of death what dreams may come...”
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
9. “You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.”
- Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
10. “I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.”
- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
11. “Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would smile at the beauty of destruction.”
- Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
12. “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
May you never fail to remember the splendor of the words.
Read on.
