Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The journey is over. Love to all.
We in middle age require adventure.
Ideas move fast when their time comes.
maturity ... is letting things happen.
Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.
Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.
Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.
Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.
You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate.
Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.
Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.
one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.
Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes.
Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.
It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.
Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world.
That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.
A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.
Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.
Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?
Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it.
A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.
One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.
Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.
Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.
The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.
In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter.
Life has this in common with prizefighting: if you've received a belly blow, it's likely to be followed by a right to the jaw.
. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.
I don't know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that's much better.
The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
We cannot guess the outcome of our actions... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies.
as the years go on a sense of deep patience comes over one; one seems to know the virtue of ripeness, and the danger of rushing events.
Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.
Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.
New York is not like London, a now-and-then place to many people. You can either not live in New York or not live anyplace else. One is either a lover or hater.
What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.
Today's youth seem finally to have understood that only by freeing woman from her exclusively sexual role can man free himself from his ordained role in the rat-race: that of the rat.
a revolutionary marriage ... [is] one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives and must find a delicate balance that can support both together and each individually.
To recommend that women become identical to men, would be simple reversal, and would defeat the whole point of androgyny, and for that matter, feminism: in both, the whole point is choice.
People who are genuinely involved in life, not just living a routine they've contrived to protect them from disaster, always seem to have more demanded of them than they can easily take on.
Nostalgia is a dangerous emotion, both because it is powerless to act in the real world, and because it glides so easily into hatred and resentment against those who have taken our Eden from us.
The sign of a good marriage is that everything is debatable and challenged; nothing is turned into law or policy. The rules, if any, are known only to the two players, who seek no public trophies.
Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.
Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes; it suggests, further, a full range of experience…it suggests a spectrum upon which human beings choose their places without regard to propriety or custom.