Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.
How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.
If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.
It's horrible getting older. I mean, it's wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it's horrible losing your looks.
Sex is God's joke on the human race ... if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead.
Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?
I was surprised by my daughter's generation and how they were rebelling against the '70s idea that sex was perfect and it should be sought.
Sexism kind of predisposes us to see men's work as more important than women's, and it is a problem, I guess, as writers, we have to change.
Every time women make tremendous strides, the right wing gets terrified and creates laws making it hard to get an abortion or birth control.
Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
Great loves have legs and wings. They are substantial. They do not dissapate so easily... Great loves have staying power. Or so I told myself.
What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.
in freeing myself from the romantic dream of finding another man to come along and rescue me, I learned that no one can rescue me except myself.
I know some good marriages-marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other.
Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.
Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.
If there's anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it's uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman's best career move.
No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.
I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.
Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.
Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.
I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.
People are terrified. A lot of them are in relationships that aren't satisfying, and if you tell them they can change their life, they get really scared.
In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.
It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.
It's important to know what you're going to spend your life on, and the only way you're going to find that is by connecting with the force inside yourself.
I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
When I met my husband, I refused to invite him home for Passover because I was embarrassed my mother might serve all the catered dishes in the wrong order.
Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery.
The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.
As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?
If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.
The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.
I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.
Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.
Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.
What I discovered was is that it's rare to find a person that you feel very intimate with, and you can sleep with lots of people and not find what you're looking for.
Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.
If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings.
It is not surprising that Venice is known above all for mirrors and glass since Venice is the most narcissistic city in the world, the city that celebrates self-mirroring.
All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.
Venice, that capital city of dream and intrigue, that double city (one above and seemingly solid, one below, wavering and reflected in the waters), which never disappoints.
I can live without it all - love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.
I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.
I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.
People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn't. Social attitudes don't change in a straight line. There's always a backlash against progressive ideas.