Neil Gaiman

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes

you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up
your heart and it means someone can get inside you and
mess you up. You build up all these defences. You
build up a whole armour, for years, so nothing can hurt
you, then one stupid person, no different from any other
stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give
them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did
something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you,
and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes
hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves
you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like
‘maybe we should be just friends’ or ‘how very
perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working its way
into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not
just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real
gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing
should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate
love.”
Ernest Hemingway
“Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.”
“Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you
want to do? Ruin me?”
“Yes. I want to ruin you.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s what I want too.”
Gary Provost
“This sentence has five words. Here are five more
words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several
together become monotonous. Listen to what is
happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of
it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands
some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length,
and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a
pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences.
And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes,
when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him
with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that
burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a
crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the
cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking
at the stars.” – Oscar Wilde
“The most important things are the hardest to say.
They are the things you get ashamed of, because
words diminish them — words shrink things that
seemed limitless when they were in your head to no
more than living size when they’re brought out. But
it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important
things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is
buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies
would love to steal away. And you may make
revelations that cost you dearly only to have people
look at you in a funny way, not understanding what
you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so
important that you almost cried while you were
saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret
stays locked within not for want of a teller but for
want of an understanding ear.” Stephen King