Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A book is simply the container of an idea-like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.
A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar
Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with
Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late Autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart.
Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.
The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.
I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.
A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.
I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.
I drew the curtains to conceal the sight of my father's farewell; my spite was sharp as broken glass.
In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.
Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.
For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.
It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.
If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.
He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.
There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.
The only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an ... urgent deadline in the offing.
Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!
I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.
Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been
It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.
Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.
His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.
The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.
Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.
Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.
I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them.
The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.
He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.
There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.
I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.
It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.
Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.
In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.
The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.
It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre--the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.
The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.
Midnight, and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves birthday, the door of the solstice still wide enough open to let them all slink through.
Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.
I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.
Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.
It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.
Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.
You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.