Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.
We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks - water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land - and not by generating renewable flows.
We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.
It was important to buy into the fact that the nine hundred pages an end-reader never sees are just as valuable as the ones that are bound and placed on the shelf.
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it.
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.
The purpose of faith isn't always to keep us from having trouble. It is often to carry us through trouble. If we never had any trouble, we wouldn't need any faith.
Extremely religious, legalistic people have a criticism or judgment about everyone and everything. They just have a way of bringing people down with what they say.
The groom always smiles proudly because he's convinced he's accomplished something quite wonderful. The bride smiles because she's been able to convince him of it.
He was the firstborn Bridgerton of a firstborn Bridgerton of a firstborn Bridgerton eight times over. He had a dynastic responsibility to be fruitful and multiply.
Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway.
On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.
Women have been repeating the same mistake since time began: falling for a man’s potential. We rarely see it the same way, and even more rarely care to achieve it.
Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.
What I do with the story itself varies of course, but what I want to do is to present the world so that the reader can access it without tripping over the details.
Andy Clark refers to humans as 'natural-born cyborgs.' What he means is that we habitually extend and change our body-concept without even thinking twice about it.
The power of 'Madame Bovary' stems from Flaubert's determination to render each object of his scrutiny exactly as it looks, or sounds or smells or feels or tastes.
I was actually very hesitant to write about Marie Antoinette. She seemed at first glance - well, I cannot think of any other term - an airhead of the first degree.
I grew up in Doraville, Georgia and I ate barbecued ribs and chicken fried steak, and all kinds of cheesy grits, you know, and I never even thought twice about it.
I've wanted you since the moment you tried to run me over. You are unlike any woman I have met before. You are strong, and courageous, and you do not suffer fools.
The first principle of ethical power is Purpose... It is the picture you have of yourself - the kind of person you want to be or the kind of life you want to lead.
You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself
The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.
After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.
If were were in a film, the villain would turn out to be the least-expected person. But as we aren't in a film, I'd go for the character who tried to strangle you.
She stared at him in that vapid, intoxicated way employed only by women under a vamp's control. Or the way I sometimes got when faced with cupcakes. Mmm. Cupcakes.
All I'd have to do then was roll with the consequences of inviting dewinged, fanged fairies into Trent's backyard. God, they were savage looking. Served him right.
As the installments in the 'Immortals After Dark' series span simultaneous timelines, making sure the details remained accurate was a hair-raising/losing exercise.
Everybody is going to have a point in their life when they can’t see any brightness at the end of the tunnel…but there always is…you just have to keep on fighting.
The one impulse in man which cannot be erased is his impulse toward freedom, his impulse toward sanity, toward higher levels of attainment in all of his endeavors.
The main thing I've learned is that we all have to learn to work with - and appreciate - the brain we've been given, and not waste time wishing things were easier.
I think it's more helpful to keep your books sort of a singular focus. Get it said, get it said well, fascinate people with your words and then write another book.
You should never start thinking about 'what might have been,' and you should also never start thinking about another boy when you're heartbroken over someone else.
You have a way of looking at things. You make it seem as though everything's going to be okay. I can't imagine a more dangerous thing to have than hope like yours.
I can almost see what Gabriel meant when he asked, 'What has the free world got that you can’t get here?' Almost. Freedom, Gabriel. That’s what you can’t get here.
Now lemme get this straight," she said in a throaty, nasal voice. "You put the lime in the cocanut and drink 'em both up--whoa, long faces. What am I interrupting?
Many people's unhappiness is rooted in the habitual role they play. While our family role may have made sense growing up, it often wreaks havoc in our adult lives.
Droplets, droplets: we are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path.
Maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.
All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie. She was learning to love.
Live free or die. Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips. Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.
If you look at all those terrorist groups - I'm talking, going back, Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, ISIS - they're all proxy armies in an Islamic civil war.
I have discovered that most people who tell me that they cannot forgive a person who wronged them are handicapped by a mistaken understanding of what forgiving is.
Modern Americans suffer from a fear of judging. Passing judgment on the behavior of fellow human beings is considered an act of medieval, undemocratic intolerance.
What if I was! That’s my point. What if I was a bit overweight and not especially pretty? Why is that so terrible? So disgusting? Why is that the end of the world?
When someone says something dunderheaded to me about the material, it's usually a big neon sign revealing their own damage or ignorance, so my compassion kicks in.
He'd pulled back a little, just with his lower half, and I was afraid the scorch in my cheeks would set fire to the rest of me, because I an idea why. Wow. Oh wow.
I would never, for the sake of the story or a twist, have a character do something that they just wouldn't do. I really couldn't. I'd rather miss out on the twist.
A woman could do that to you - reach that place in your soul where the best and worst of you was kept. And once she was there, she owned that place and never left.