Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Joy and sadness come by turns.
Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Children notice things first, people later.
Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away.
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.
A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.
But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.