A favorite quotation from highly quotable Terry Pratchett: “Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.” This is part of a complete...
The writer Richard Trench has a lovely quote that echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous lines about language as fossil poetry: “Language is the amber in which a thousand precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.”...
Kurt Vonnegut gave us this timeless quote in his novel Cat’s Cradle: “People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really...
Let’s settle this once and for all: George Bernard Shaw is responsible for the sentiment behind the quote, “Youth is wasted on the young.” But Fred Shapiro’s Yale Book of Quotations indicates that the history of the saying...
Mark Twain famously said that he’d never write “metropolis” for 7 cents when he could write “city” for the same fee, and it stands as good advice for writers looking to make economical word choices. This is part of a...
Michel de Montaigne once wrote, “A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.” This is a classic example of chiasmus, or a reversal of clauses that together make a larger point. This is part of a complete episode...

