Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The process of discovering who we are and what we are here to do . . . is dependent . . . on our ability to stay positive and to find a silver lining in all events.
The semi-colon is a burp, a hiccup. It's a drunk staggering out of the saloon at 2 a.m., grabbing your lapels on the way and asking you to listen to one more story.
The spirits talk of many levels. It's not a physical level where you go up the steps to get to the next one. It's consciousness and how evolved spiritually you are.
In addition to public housing, South Williamsburg is home to shabby artists' lofts like mine, apartments of Hasidic Jews, and one extremely tall, high-priced condo.
I'd like to think I'm not quite so pretentious as to think my characters go off and live their lives once I've written the final page and switched the computer off.
We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.
Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood.
A lawyer is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, anymore than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table.
Never assume that simply having a gun makes you a marksman. You are no more armed because you are wearing a pistol than you are a musician because you own a guitar.
The party should stand for a constantly wider diffusion of property. That is the greatest social and economic security that can come to free men. It makes men free.
I can clean my own house. Now, maybe a couple of times a year we have a cleaning crew come in before we have a party, but otherwise, I'm able to maintain it myself.
Sorry wastes time. You have to live your life like you'll never be sorry. It's easier just to do the right thing from the start so there's nothing to apologize for.
How then can we deal with our tendency toward worldliness? It is not by determining that we will not be worldly, but by committing ourselves to becoming more godly.
The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.
I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two countries I really know. I never feel fully one way or the other.
I don't actually keep the dresses I've worn during other friends' weddings. Closets are small in New York City - I can't be squandering space on bridesmaid dresses.
But I always seem to finish a book and then think, oh God, I've got to pay a tax bill, so I'd better write a novel, so I tend not to stop and learn word processing.
Sometimes it isn't easy to be sane, smart, and responsible. Sometimes it sucks. Sucks wang. Camel wang. But that doesn't turn wrong into right or stupid into smart.
Gruff,” I said, “I find myself largely clueless about why mortal women do what they do. It will take a wiser man than me to understand what’s in a fae woman’s mind.
The reason "other churches" don't grow: "Jim, the truth is, I couldn't have a real prayer meeting in my church. I'd be embarrassed at the smallness of the crowd..."
Get around people who have something of value to share with you. Their impact will continue to have a significant effect on your life long after they have departed.
Goals are like a magnet - they pull. And the stronger they are, the more purposeful they are, the bigger they are, the more unique they are, the stronger they pull.
How much should you earn? As much as you possibly can. It doesn't matter whether you earn $10,000 a year or $100,000 a year as long as you've done the best you can.
I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
A love story - your own, or anyone else's - is interior, hidden. It can never be accurately reported, only imagined. It is all dreams and invention. It's guesswork.
You priests. You're all the same. You think fasting helps you think about God, when anyone who can cook would tell you that fasting just makes you think about food.
I imagined what it would be like to hold a butterfly in your hands something bejeweled and treasured and to know that despite your devotion it was dying by degrees.
Listen, I would say, this is not how I thought our lives would go; and may be we cannot find our way out of this alley. But there is no one I'd rather be lost with.
They might have been all-right people doing the best they could, but I got to tell you, you got a dead cat lying in your yard you ought to bury it. That’s my motto.
As soon as you start to feel differently about what you already have, you will start to attract more of the good things, more of the things you can be grateful for.
Everyone has the power to impact the outcome of his life. The way to do it is to focus on today. . . It is too late for yesterday. And you can't depend on tomorrow.
I grew up in the home of a pastor, and my earliest memory is that God really had a plan for my life and that I was special - this is really weird - but I felt that.
Zen is a special transmission outside the scriptures,With no reliance on words and letters.A direct pointing to the human mind,And the realization of enlightenment.
With your reorientation as awareness, difficulty calls upon your resources - not first the resources that you're familiar with, but the resources of your own being.
Christianity has basically communicated to men that the reason God put you on this Earth is to be a good boy. Mind your manners, be a nice guy. That's soul killing!
Afflictions have the same use and end to our souls, that frosty weather hath upon those clothes that are laid and bleaching, they alter the hue and make them white.
It has been my experience that maximizing income is a helluva lot less important than maximizing passion and fulfillment in your both professionally and personally.
Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me.
"And how are you feeling?" asked Patrick."Oh, I'm grand." Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. "I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend."
I think it's crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn't. Book tours should be part of what keeps independent bookstores vibrant and profitable.
The Catholic hierarchy has become more conservative. What we don't know is whether [Catholic voters] will become increasingly conservative, or .. stay swing voters.
If I could do it all over again," he said, his speech slow and vaguely mangled by his massive lower lip, "I'd just let myself be trampled to death by the Satan Pig.
If you look in the dictionary under 'perfectionist,' you see Henry Selick correcting the definition of perfectionist in the dictionary. I mean, he is so meticulous.
Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.
We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.
In Land of Milk and Money, Anthony Barcellos mines rich family history to create a full-blooded tale that readers will find insightful, rewarding, and entertaining.
As a preacher, my charge is to proclaim the message of the Scriptures. To help the people in my congregation become a people of the book. I love getting to do this.
The natural man "cannot see or discern that divine excellency in the Scripture, without an apprehension whereof no man can believe it aright to be the word of God."