Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.
If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.
The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?
There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier.
So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.
My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?
Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.
Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.
Oh, bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time.
The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed
Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.
My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other.
When I think about it, I'm happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They'll preorder me. What a lucky guy!
I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.
Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.
What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.
The learnin' mind is the livin' mind, Meronym said, an any sort o'Smart is truesome Smart, old Smart or new high Smart or low.
Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.
I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.
She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.
I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents.
What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell.
If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.
Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.
Often I think boys don’t become men. Boys just get papier-mâchéd inside a man’s mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there.
A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice.
I wonder how many years Suga has been carrying his curse around with him. I forget that other people in the world have broken parts too.
Eva. Every day I've climbed up the belfry chanting a lucky chant at one syllable per beat, "To-day-to-day-let-her-be-here-to-day-to-day.
Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.
A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.
Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day.
Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.
I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.
You can maintain power over people, as long as you give them something. Rob a man of everything, and that man will no longer be in your power.
Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.
Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups.
It'll be all right." Julia's gentleness makes it worse. "In the end, Jace." "It doesn't feel very all right." "That's because it's not the end.
Don't bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.
...it’s not just the person who fills a house, it’s their I’ll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses.
- This isn't an interrogation or a trail. Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters. -Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.
There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why.
Under the Enrichment Laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime.
Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?
. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.
Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.
I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.
…and there, in the background, the sky’s sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words ‘I am’ dissolved into blue peace. He said it. ‘The ocean.
As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.