Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We live in a disposable, 'cast-off and throw-away' society that has largely lost any real sense of permanence. Ours is a world of expiration dates, limited shelf life, and planned obsolescence. Nothing is absolute.
Change or be changed, right? And what we mean by that is that climate change, if we don't change course, if we don't change our political and economic system, is going to change everything about our physical world.
The first thing is how awful cancer was, the experience. When you first go through it, you're just trying to survive. But when I wrote about it, I really digested it. It was unbearable but I had practice behind me.
The best value for money in cooking equipment, in my mind, is first a digital scale and digital thermometer. They're both about $20. They help you cook so much more accurately that they're both enormously valuable.
What he's really saying is: Please be a human being. With a life so full of rules and regiments, it's so easy to forget that's what they are. She knows—she sees—how often compassion takes a back seat to expediency.
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
The purpose of all relationships is to create a sacred context within which you can express the fullness of who you are. And who you are is an experience you have before you enter relationship, not because you did.
Happiness is a decision, not an experience. You can decide to be happy without what you thought you needed in order to be happy, and you will be. Your experience is the result of your decision, not the cause of it.
The first problem, of course, is that we haven't learned to love ourselves. That's the first problem. We can only give to another what we have to give. And if we have no love over here, we can't give it over there.
Doing is a function of the body. Being is a function of the soul. The body is always doing something. Every minute of every day it's up to something. It never stops, it never rests, it's constantly doing something.
A Separation Sociology produces a Separation Pathology, pathological behaviors of self-destruction, engaged in individually and collectively, and producing suffering, conflict, violence, and death by our own hands.
It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.
Nothin’ wrong with witchfinding. I’d like to be a witchfinder. It’s just, well, you’ve got to take it in turns. Today we’ll go out witchfinding, an’ tomorrow we could hide, an’ it’d be the witches’ turn to find US.
Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.
The key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are self-confirming....(some beliefs are) fanatical not because they are "false", but because they are expressed in such a way that they can never be shown to be false.
Probably one of the strongest movements of the Holy Spirit is in the Roman Catholic Church, so there's not a huge theological difference between the official teaching of the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church.
Then I turned the page and at the top it said THINGS I MISS ABOUT M and there was a list of 15 things, and the first was THE WAY HE HOLDS THINGS. I did not understand how you can miss the way somebody holds things.
After 9/11, most Americans were in no mood to talk with our enemies in the Middle East, whatever those enemies' ideology, and the Bush administration's policies of invasion and pre-emption reflected that sentiment.
[As a writer] you have to have the three D's: drive, discipline and desire. If you're missing any one of those three, you can have all the talent in the world, but it's going to be really hard to get anything done.
You have heard the expression 'love is blind'" "I think it's bullshit. Lust dazzles, sure, at least for the short term. But love clears the vision. You see better, sharper, because you feel more that you did before
My fondest wish, I suppose, would be to die at the keyboard right after finishing a book, perhaps with a little time off to have some really good sex. It's not, 'Oh, thank God, this is book No. 250. I can die now.'
But Roarke doesn't feel weird about it. He's full of it, the love, I mean. And when he loves me, things that never worked in me did - do. It was easier when they didn't work, but it's better when they do. You know?
What is past is past. You can do nothing about yesterday and last month and the failures of last year, but you can do everything toward making tomorrow and the rest of your life what you always dreamed it could be.
To have done no man a wrong...to walk and live, unseduced, within arm's length of what is not your own, with nothing between your desire and its gratification but the invisible law of rectitude-this is to be a man.
American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.
A writer's voice is not character alone, it is not style alone; it is far more. A writer's voice line the stroke of an artist's brush- is the thumbprint of her whole person- her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms.
With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.
That's such a great book [Bloods]. That's a perfect way to articulate this thing that we're talking about. Just because someone is a black general, doesn't mean this person is going to have a certain outlook on it.
This is all about knowing a market, ... and it's so thorough that even if you don't have personal experience in that market you can still go into it and find out, what are the things that people will pay money for!
There's always been in my life that tension between living and writing. For me, because I'm so physically exuberant, it was extra hard to sit still at the desk and put in the hours that you need to put in to write.
Marmite - like that other little black-jar job, Bovril - is so much a Mark 1 staple-of-Empire brand, so much part of the Edwardian world of enamel advertising signs, the history of grin-and-bear-it industrial food.
With a goose-quill and a few sheets of paper, I mock myself of the universe. They say I am the son of a courtesan; it may be so, but I have the heart of a King. I live free, I enjoy myself, I can call myself happy.
We all belong here equally...Just by being born onto the earth we are accepted and the earth supports us. We don't have to be especially good. We don't have to accomplish anything. We don't even have to be healthy.
In the spiritual life every person is his or her own discoverer, and you need not grieve if your discoveries are not believed in by others. It is your business to push on find more and increase individual happiness
He it is, the innermost one, who awakens my being with his deep hidden touches. He it is who puts his enchantment upon these eyes and joyfully plays on the chords of my heart in varied cadence of pleasure and pain.
If you want to call yourself my friend, you should know that position comes with boundaries." Sabine frowned. "I'm no good with boundaries." "Yes, and the ocean is damp. Can we be done with the understatements now?
When he finally stopped calling, the hush felt strange. It felt like the whole world went silent when Marc did, as if I could see peoples mouths moving, but I couldnt hear what they were saying. Like I'd gone deaf.
Why are we not tasting the bliss of Bhakti? Because we are taking shelter of stone boats. We are sinking and drowning in Maya & still we are further taking shelter of stone boats and this can go on life after life.
I think as an author you have to allow a movie to be separate from the book. It's an entirely different animal. I almost never mind when a movie changes or cuts something - as long as it helps the film work better.
The literal meaning of "yoga" is "union," "integration," "reconnection." But in the context of practice, yoga is a way of gaining access to your own inner luminosity and becoming established in your essential self.
Flowers heal me. Tulips make me happy. I keep myself surrounded by them as soon as they start coming to the island from Canada, and after that when they come from the fields in La Connor, not far from where I live.
I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.
one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.
Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.
Caring what others think about us is normal. The desire to belong is basic to human nature. But in order to feel like you truly belong, you must accept yourself for who you are. This is critical to Fearless Living.
Over-consumption is a cancer eating away at our spiritual vitals. It distances us from the great masses of broken bleeding humanity. It converts us into materialists. We become less able to ask the moral questions.
...today it is the duty of every thinking being to live, and to serve not only his own day and generation, but also generations unborn by helping to restore and maintain the green glory of the forests of the earth.
The answer came to me before I'd even finished asking myself the question. I couldn't be Mason's girlfriend because when I imagined someone holding me and whispering dirty things in my ear, he had a Russian accent.
Everything Iʹd been taught about eluding someone came rushing back to my head. What I wanted to do more than anything was look around and see if I had a follower, but that would have definitely attracted attention.
I think anytime you're writing to the middle grades, you're writing to young readers who are trapped in a number of ways between two worlds: between childhood and adulthood, between their friends and their parents.