Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house.
To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.
Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.
Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.
Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.
I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.
I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war.
Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.
My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.
They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.
The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.
And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.
We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.
Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine.
If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.
She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.
We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.
Who is the brave man--he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.
I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.
The Sarajevans have a very particular world view - a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and... truckloads of guts, you know.
Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence.
It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.
You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.
There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.
There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.
The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads.
September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage.
One thing I believe completely is that the human heart remains the human heart, no matter how our material circumstances change as we move together through time.
I'm very, very leery of nonfiction books where they change timeframes and use - what do they call those things? - composite characters. I don't think that's right.
I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.
I was a pretty delicate kid. Anything that was going around I'd get it and I'd generally get it much worse than other people, so I spent a lot of time out of school.
The structure of 'March' was laid down for me before the first line was written, because my character has to exist within Louisa May Alcott's 'Little Women' plotline.
I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled.
Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733.
God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.
I'm a praying atheist. When I hear an ambulance siren, I ask for a blessing for those people in trouble, knowing that no one's listening. I think it's just a habit of mindfulness.
If you look at an illuminated manuscript, even today, it just blows your mind. For them, without all the clutter and inputs that we have, it must have been even more extraordinary.
Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?
Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?'
I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.
Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?
If screenwriters have to kill off a female character, they love to give her cancer. We've seen so many great actresses go down to the Big C: Ali MacGraw, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Debra Winger, Susan Sarandon.
The dirty little secret of foreign correspondents is that 90 per cent of it is showing up. If you can find a way to get there, the story, the reporting, it's the easiest you'll ever do. 'Cause the drama's everywhere.
Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade.
The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow.
I had this story that had been banging around in my head and I thought, 'I'll just see if there's anything there.' So I wrote a few chapters of the book that became 'Year of Wonders,' and lucky for me it found its readers.
Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?
When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.