Ng Wen Xu > Ng's Quotes

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.”
― Mason Cooley

“All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Memories are worse than bullets.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“True freedom comes from being unknown.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Jiko looked out accross the ocean to where the water met the sky. "A wave is born from the deep conditions of the ocean," she said. "A person is born form the deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and roll along like a wave. Until it's time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow. Karl Jung said this about 'the Shadow' in one of his books: 'It is as evil as we are positive... the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive... The fact is that if one tries beyond one's capacity to be perfect, the shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil. For it is just as sinful from the standpoint of nature and of truth to be above oneself as to be below oneself.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Religion is like language or dress. We gravitate toward the practices with which we were raised. In the end, though, we are all proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning. That we are grateful for the power that created us.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“Buddha had said:
"Each of us is a God. Each of us knows all. We need only open our minds to hear our own wisdom.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“…In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.”
― Dan Brown, Digital Fortress

“Deep down we've never been who we think we once were, and we only remember what never happened.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Prisoner of Heaven

“Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game