Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Verbs. All of them tiring.
Our worst pain is confined within our own skin.
I know I don't need him, but I think I want him.
Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.
You never know when somebody will pull you to them.
Disease is nature's revenge for our destructiveness.
It is a bad idea to live too long. Few carry it off well.
I had never taken creative writing classes. Hadn't even considered it.
It's a good thing war is so terrible or else we'd get to liking it too much.
When all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. Only desire trumps time.
It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond to
It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond to.
When everything is immediately available and infinitely reproducible, nothing is valuable.
If I had to give up reading or give up listening to music, I suspect I'd stick with the music.
Needing and getting don’t seem likely to match up any time soon... What needs doing is mine to do.
I was 46 when 'Cold Mountain' came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm.
She always carried a book, though, in case she needed to read a few pages to avoid unwanted conversation.
We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical
People who are isolated interest me, whether they isolate themselves or have been isolated by circumstances.
There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.
Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don't just survive. Celebrate.
He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.
Nothing changes what alreaday happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.
Surely it is a sin to reject the few gifts we are given. Be happy in the flash of time granted to us or hurt forever.
[No] matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial.
I've lived out West some... I've always liked the High Plains areas - eastern Colorado, eastern Wyoming, western Nebraska.
I do the same things I did when I was 12 years old: I ride bikes, I read books, I walk in the woods. And I listen to music.
Well, I'm a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not.
Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.
Ask her what she craved, and she'd get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom.
That's not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn't suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on
He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been burned out of him but he was yet walking.
It is best not to study too much on who gets what they deserve. It can lead to an overly complicated interpretation of God's personal attributes.
Contentment is mostly a matter of talking yourself into believing that God will not strike you too hard for leaning in the direction of your hungers.
What I'm certain I don't want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.
My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.
A lizard in the spring - hear his darling sing. A bird with wings to fly - go back to his darling weep and moan till he dies. A mole in the ground - root a mountain down.
We are not strong enough to stand up against endless grief, And yet pain is the constant drone of life. So if we are to have any happiness at all, it is only in the passing instant.
I've never been very attached to genre labels and never set out intentionally to write historic fiction. Besides, what you consider historic depends on how far back your memory extends.
Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consciousness, we call our response sacred.
All I can say is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren.
What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?
He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better.
What you have lost will not be returned to you; it always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on, or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you.
Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn't change them. most of the time, they couldn't change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance.
I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear...And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter." "I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't see why not you." "Why not me?
Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in Black Mask magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
Publishers give you deadlines for those last phases of production that are perfectly comfortable for them. So, to whatever extent I can, I like to push those to give me a little more time, and make it so that they're as uncomfortable as I am.
Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life - joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss - from fire into smoke rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.