Harlan Ellison Quotes

“Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin works, tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans!”

“Canning is a whole world of a thing to do. It requires that you get out of your head. It's a Zen thing. You cannot be wondering about your inadequacies and how they drove Bob off and be making jelly. You'll wind up with big, cylindrical jujubes.”

“The world is alive, and just as we humans draw energy from connection with other human beings, so we do too from this world.”

“Look, you can say that life is meaningless, because in the end we are all no more than dust in the wind and all that we do will ultimately be forgotten in hundreds or thousands of years’ time. But do you really want to live with that belief? Give yourself a higher meaning, give yourself a purpose why you were given this life. I am not a religious person but I do believe that we are all given this life for a reason, and that death is only the beginning of something bigger. Call me crazy, I don’t care. It gives me sense and an urgency to make this life count because I know it matters. You feel that way because you do not have that. Give this life a meaning and all that you do and will come to do will become meaningful instead of meaningless”

“It’s true that no one ever said life would be easy, but it’s also true that no ever said you had to do it alone.”

“It’s true that no one ever said life would be easy, but it is also true that no one ever said you had to go through it alone.”

“Removing yourself from the familiar and opting for the unfamiliar opens up the unknown. And within the unknown there are questions we have never asked ourselves; experiences we have never imagined; lessons we have never had a chance to learn. What we ultimately need when we are stuck within a bubble, is change. Another perspective of seeing and knowing what is possible. Traveling will open that up for you. The world will play its role; all you need to do, is pack your bags and allow it to happen.”

“Your scars are unique gems that contain opportunities for both personal growth and to help save the life of someone else. However, you can only realize these when you fully claim who you are. And to fully claim who you are also means recognizing, and taking ownership of the scars that come along with the rest of you.”

“How much your life sucks, or how awesome your life is, is really all determined by how much fear controls your life.”

“Your heart is who you are. It’s the one and only thing throughout the whole world, which will never lie to you. From the very first moment you start to be honest with it, and you start to act on your dreams in life, your heart will stop making you unhappy.”