Quotes by Richard Bach

The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.

Listen to what you know instead of what you fear.

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding.

Like everything else, Fletcher. Practice.

If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. Thats all there is to it.

Remember where you came from, where you’re going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place. Youre going to die a horrible death, remember. Its all good training, and youll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind. Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less-advanced life-forms, and theyll call you crazy.

Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?

A professional writer is an amateur who didnt quit.

Tell him I said that he will know when hes my age that books arent written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writings a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.

There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.

Whatever harm I would do to another, I shall do first to myself.As I respect and am kind to myself, so shall I respect and be kind to peers, to elders, to kits.I claim for others the freedom to live as they wish, to think and believe as they will. I claim that freedom for myself.I shall make each choice and live each day to my highest sense of right.

We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.

Get this in mind early: We never grow up.

Can miles truly separate you from friends... If you want to be with someone you love, arent you already there?

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

Dont be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.

dont you think between here and now we will see each other once or twice?

My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.