Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.
You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.
People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.
No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.
Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.
People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
I think the myths are keeping us limited to, and tied to, what I would call the hyper-masculine tradition. All the major religions in the world have been founded by men and propagated by men.
With all deference to Chairman Mao and other authors whose quotations derive from longer works, it seemed that I was becoming the world's first writer of self-contained ready-made quotations.
The whole point of cryopreserving only one's head is based on the idea that one can simply grow in the laboratory an entire new body, without a head, and stick it onto the cryopreserved head.
Moral prejudices are the stopgaps of virtue; and, as is the case with other stopgaps, it is often more difficult to get either out or in through them than through any other part of the fence.
Marriage finally became acceptable to the churches when laws were established that could make it a means of depriving women of incomes and property, and making wives the equivalent of slaves.
They don’t think “I care,” “I hurt,” or “I have feelings.” It just seems like I’m always “wrong,” always “selfish,” always “self-centered” and everything else that’s negative and destructive.
Why did everyone think I needed a new boyfriend? I didn't need a new boyfriend. I'd had enough of boyfriends to last a lifetime. The only thing a boyfriend was good for was a shattered heart.
Our tendency in life is to avoid things that frighten us. But in order to become whole, we need to go deeper and deeper into ourselves by reaching further and further into the things we fear.
Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn't adopt chemistry as a religion.
Ramona was originally an accidental character I added to the Henry Huggins books because I noticed that none of the characters had siblings. I added Ramona as Beazus' pestering little sister.
You don't have to be any more talented, any richer, any slimmer, any smarter, any more or less of anything to partner with God. All you have to be is willing to be used by him in everyday way
Before God, I'm an intimate. Before people, I'm a servant. Before the powers of hell, I'm a ruler, with no tolerance for their influence. Wisdom knows which role to fulfill at the proper time
Anything that's left that's remotely like wilderness should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. It's not going to save you to go in and cut the last old-stand forests.
The true antidote to greed is contentment. If you have a strong sense of contentment, it doesn't matter whether you obtain the object of your desire or not. Either way, you are still content.
Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class.
My personal view about how people should use Twitter is less relevant than our goal to provide the infrastructure for a new kind of communication and then support the creativity that emerges.
When the kids were growing up, we didn't have a television in the house connected to a cable or an antenna. If something bad happened in the world, I wanted the kids to hear about it from me.
And I deeply pray that everyone discovers that they can strip away anything that might be holding them back on every level, and can begin living life from the real essence of their own soul.
The spirituality of wonder knows the world is charged with grace, that while sin and war, disease and death are terribly real, God's loving presence and power in our midst are even more real.
Everybody has a vocation to some form of life-work. However, behind that call (and deeper than any call), everybody has a vocation to be a person to be fully and deeply human in Christ Jesus.
But still when the mists of doubt prevail, And we lie becalmed by the shores of age, We hear from the misty troubled shore The voce of children gone before. Drawing the soul to its anchorage.
Twitter represents a collective collaboration that manifests our ability to unconsciously connect kindred voices through the experiences that move us. As such, Twitter is a human seismograph.
There's plenty of room for finger-pointing for the debacle in Iraq. If it's a problem that the Iraqi military is broken at its core, then there's no point in sending more Humvees and Apaches.
If you draw your sword against those you sworn to protect, the very ones who trust in your strength, how will you convince them that you are a shield when the dragons come and take them away?
The real violence is committed in the writing of history, the records of the legal system, the reporting of news, through the manipulation of social contracts, and the control of information.
I was advocating for world peace, but I was waging a violent war against my own body. I was speaking about poverty and starvation, but I was eating more than my fair share. I was a hypocrite.
It's not easy to find your own way when you believe that you need love, approval, appreciation, or anything from your family. It's particularly hard when you want them to see things your way.
Some things are only real because they represent what we think. When we learn the truth and think it, the old reality is no longer real to us and loses its hold on us. The truth sets us free.
I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations.
After my mom died, there was so much written about her fashion and her style and all that, and I felt that one of the most important parts of her was missing, her real intellectual curiosity.
I do a lot of reflection. I do. I spend a lot of time in reflection and contemplation. I guess the way the old mystics used to do. I don't do meditation. That's not for me. It's not my thing.
I have to trust that there is a force greater than me that also knows and sees this, and breathes with it and knows that it's part of a grander plan, and all the good things people do matter.
What's interesting to me is how many vampire/urban fantasy authors are writing young adult series as well, often set in the same world as their adult books, but focused on a younger audience.
With no other choices open to us, we'd turned our gaze seaward. The oceans were our America: they reached farther than any prairie, untamed as on the first day of creation. Nobody owned them.
I wouldn't cut you out of my life Clary, any more than I would cut off my right hand and give it to someone as a Valentine's Day gift." Gross," said Clary. "Must you?" Simon grinned. "I must.
Because in the end nothing is worse than seeing the fall of one you loved. It was somehow worse than losing a love. It made everything seem questionable. It made the past bitter and confused.
Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken or out of place, different somehow, royalty mistakenly born into a family of peasants. The difference in your case is that it's true.
What you said was true. we don't live or love in a vacuum. There are people around us who care about us who would be hurt, maybe destroyed if we let ourselves feel what we might want to feel.
Forsooth, I no longer toil in vain, To prove that demon pox warps the brain. So though 'ti pity, it's not in vain That the pox-ridden worm was slain: For to believe in me, you all must deign.
No matter how many books you've written, whenever you sit down to write a new book, you always feel the same challenge - how do you shape this story into a book that people are going to love.
In other people's books, I tend to love the really daredevil-y characters. I love Finnick from 'The Hunger Games.' And I think, probably, my favorite character of all time is Sherlock Holmes.
I ultimately decided to hold my tongue and settle instead for the comfort of ignorance. Not knowing the truth, I retained hope, and that hope I held like a smooth warm stone against my heart.
As we grew to love South Australia, we felt that we were in an expanding society, still feeling the bond to the motherland, but eager to develop a perfect society in the land of our adoption.
I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.