Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.
You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.
That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.
Write down the thoughts and even more, write down a specific line. If you don't, it'll fly away forever.
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling.
There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.
As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before.
You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse.
You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.
Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.
And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.
The biggest debt is always the government debt; it's always debt that government has run up on your behalf.
It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.
Thy only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die, John and Mary die, John and Mary die.
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.
His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.
There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
and each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.
Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.
So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.
It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.
Gravity works in your life, the notion of free will works in your life, however problematic it may at times be.
Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.
The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.
I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.
We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others.
Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.
More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?
Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.
There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.
No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.
I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.
They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.
Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.
The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.
Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It's a question of how those tools are used by people.
The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'
A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.