Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The more I did it-the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high. It was something. Don't say it wasn't.
I'd extend an invitation to Lisbeth Salander. She would definitely shake the party up and get it started. I think she is hands down one of the most original, innovative, kickass female fictional characters ever.
There's this tradition of women's magazines - which have been my bread and butter as a freelancer - where the paradigm is that the writing is about relationships, body image, lessons, and it's always redemptive.
Talking won't change it. But sometimes it was what she wanted most, to tell someone; often, though, she just wanted to escape those horrid feelings, to escape herself, so there was no pain, no fear, no ugliness.
Getting angry over something that won't change is like seeing what happens if you hit your hand with a hammer over and over again, and being surprised each time when it hurts. So you might as well stop doing it.
One can't run in a park without a dog or make angels in the snow without a child and there are things one can't do without a lover, so the loss of the lover is like an amputation and the patient goes into shock.
Don't duh me!" Puck snapped. "Trying to figure out what you're thinking from one day to the next takes more brains than I have." Well, maybe you should stop. I'd hate to burn out that little peanut in your head.
It's not unreasonable to imagine that, at least as we're in a transition to a world economy, it's still necessary now to pay attention to how our country is doing economically in comparison with other countries.
Communication is the channel through which life is conveyed, through which ideas and the energy behind them are transmitted, and through which the mind, body, and spirit are merged into a force for right action.
The vicious cycle that is bringing down European states is not going to hit us [the USA], at least not for a while, at the level of the federal government. The same cannot be said of state and local governments.
Unless you can be in a place yourself and go through the subject of your story yourself, the next best thing is not to read a book about it, or see a movie about it, it's to talk to the people who've been there.
Being here in Detroit, our public education in this city is - it's shocking. And the oversight of it and the oversight of the teachers and the funding is nonexistent, and the priority that's put on it is so low.
As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.
In life, purpose is defined by the thing that makes you angry. Martin Luther was angry; Mandela was angry; Mahatma Gandhi was angry; Mother Teresa was angry. If you are not angry, you do not have a ministry yet.
God is no White Knight who charges into the world to pluck us like distressed damsels from the jaws of dragons, or diseases. God chooses to become present to and through us. It is up to us to rescue one another.
GLHR... has used Greenpeace-style media antics to draw more public attention to the plight of sweatshop workers than the multimillion - dollar international trade union movement has achieved in almost a century.
A utopian future for the Internet could be secured if the heavy-duty influencers - and the grassroots influencers tweeting along - can create a new global organization peopled with defenders of Internet freedom.
Since Reagan there has been this tradition, which has become a cliche, of promising morning in America, this fake optimism, we're the best, the city on the hill. In fact the great American task is self-scrutiny.
Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to cut all sources of retreat. Only by doing so can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win - essential to success.
Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.
I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.
Why pay a fee for Internet content when a million free sites are just a click away? There's no incentive until people are too addicted to the Net to turn off their computers, yet are bored with what's available.
Being a visionary is a new profession, but it is really just a variant on fortunetelling, which may be the world's oldest. And its marketing appeal is similar - people will pay for reassurance about the unknown.
...One thing you learn when you've lived as long as I have-people aren't all good, and people aren't all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives. Right now, I'm pleased to be in the light.
How many kids are in the Graveyard?" "A bunch." "Who sends your supplies?" "George Washington. Or is it Abraham Lincoln? I forget." "How often do you receive new arrivals?" "About as often as you beat your wife.
When you find inner peace, neither the presence nor absence of any person, place or thing, condition, circumstance, or situation can be the Creator of your state of mind or the cause of your experience of being.
It is our job to continue imagining higher, and even higher, states of being - higher thoughts, word and deeds - in order that we might continue creating ourselves anew in the next grandest version of ourselves.
The soul is forever being. It is being what it is being, regardless of what the body is doing, not because of what it's doing. If you think your life is about doingness, you do not understand what you are about.
Stopping smoking was most dramatic for me. After 23 years, I picked up a cigarette one day and didn't know why I was doing it. Smoking was no longer in alignment with what I had intended to experience of myself.
Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad.
No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.
We sat on the bank and the river went by. As always, it was making sounds to itself, and now it made sounds to us. It would be hard to find three men sitting side by side who knew better what a river was saying.
Once we roared like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security! The solution for America's problem is not in terms of big government, but it is in big men over whom nobody stands in control but God.
When fate throws a dagger at you, there are ways to catch it. If you catch it by the blade, you can harm yourself. But if you catch it by the handle, you can use it to help you fight through the obstacles ahead.
It is those who concentrates on but one thing at a time who advance in this world. The great man or woman is the one who never steps outside his or her specialty or foolishly dissipates his or her individuality.
What a great discrepancy there is between people and the results they achieve! It is due to the difference in their power of calling together all the rays of their ability, and concentrating them upon one point.
I wish I could fill every young man who reads these pages with an utter dread and horror of poverty. I wish I could make you so feel its shame, its constraint, its bitterness that you would make vows against it.
When we begin to desire a thing, to yearn for it with all our hearts, we begin to establish relationship with it in proportion to the strength and persistency of our longing and intelligent effort to realize it.
The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn't be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn't yet shown up.
It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me.
I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.
Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.
The average prison term for a convicted murderer in America is 6.5 years. The average tenure for a member of Congress is 13 years. We've got it backwards. We are giving early release to the wrong criminal class.
Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in.
I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.
Crime, horror, and satire each aim to reveal an ugly or uncomfortable truth: one that, after the reveal, will ensure we'll never be the same. The big difference between those genres being the effect they create.
My favorite new character isn't new, but more fleshed out - Gadd, the alekeep at the Tunnel. He's got him some teeth and tats. His history is hinted at in Discourse, and I plan to explore it more in later books.
Rage keeps the person who feels it company. It moves into the hollows left by grief and loss, and turns inside you like a dark furred animal that grows and fills you; it kills off loneliness and takes its place.
Look, Chief, you can't go off half-cocked looking for vengeance against a fish. That shark isn't evil. It's not a murderer. It's just obeying its own instincts. Trying to get retribution against a fish is crazy.
Rule One: Whenever a spectator seeks out a really good vantage point and settles down on shooting stick or canvas chair, the tallest and fattest golf watcher on the course will take up station directly in front.