Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.
When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end.
When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.
What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else.
It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.
Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.
When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.
He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.
I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife… as if I’m lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That’s why I’m not allowed a knife.
But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.
Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings. To me it's the latter, so I sign up
Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.
I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.
I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.
Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.
I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.
We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.
If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, "How's the little lady today!" you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.
Why are you so interested in amoebas?" "Oh, they're immortal," he said, "and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.
My family was scientifically inclined: My brother did turn into a neurophysiologist, and I almost became a scientist myself. I could have gone that way.
We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.
I feel that the task of criticizing my poetry is best left to others (i.e. critics) and would much rather have it take place after I am dead. If at all.
More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television... because you are supplying just about everything... you're a creator.
Creating some god for one's inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not.
People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.
A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means.
The reader cannot see into your heart. He will know only what you tell him. Make the blind see your words. Make the hard-hearted feel. Make the deaf hear.
I'm with the spirit of Earth-Day-yet-to-come. Nobody can really predict the future, all you can do is look at trends, and that could change at any moment.
You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.
Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.
I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.
It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.
I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That's science fiction; it isn't going to happen.
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
I hate to break this to you: One of these days I'm going to die. I expect that when I croak I'll no longer be using Twitter, unless I can do it from the grave.
As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter.
He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.
Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for baby girls. It's a wonder the military hasn't got on to this.
No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.
And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.
Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
Kafka thought his stories were hilarious. We don't necessarily have that reaction to them, but he certainly laughed his head off every time he read them out loud.
The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.