Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I believe the structure of 'House of Leaves' is far more difficult to explain than it is to read. And while I'd like to lay claim to some extraordinary act of originality, truth is I'm only taking advantage of capabilities inherent in everyone.
Jesus is not "out of touch with our reality. He's been through weakness and testing, experienced it all - all but the sin. So let's walk right up to him and get what he is so ready to give. Take the mercy, accept the help" (Heb. 4:15 - 16 MSG).
When you know you are of worth, you don't have to raise your voice, you don't have to become rude, you don't have to become vulgar; you just are. And you are like the sky is, as the air is, the same way water is wet. It doesn't have to protest.
My great blessing is my son, but I have daughters. I have white ones and Black ones and fat ones and thin ones and pretty ones and plain. I have gay ones and straight. I have daughters. I have Asian ones, I have Jewish ones, I have Muslim ones.
[Keenan] 'What am I going to do?' He sank to the floor. [Donia] 'Hope that some of us are kinder to you than you've been to us,' she whispered. Then, before she could soften again, she walked away and left the Summer King kneeling in her foyer.
The belief that a personal life exists apart from God creates experience disconnected from God. This is painful and frustrating. Our spiritual work is to break down the illusion that we have a life here and that a life of God is somewhere else.
Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.
I always find with my stories that the way they start is that I just get so interested in a person that I'm compelled to go back to them over and over until I learn more and more about them, without even quite thinking it's material for a book.
My whole interest in food grew from my interest in gardens and the question of how we engage with the natural world. To go back even further, I got interested in gardens because I was interested in nature and wilderness and Thoreau and Emerson.
When you feel happy, really happy, it somehow seems that you've always been happy and that you'll always be happy. The same is often true when you feel sad, or lonely, or depressed, or broke, or sick, or scared. Something, perhaps, to remember.
I don't believe in dieting, I don't believe in having certain moments in your life where you're healthy and then moments when you're like, "I'm going to eat whatever I want." It's just finding what works for your body and always eating healthy.
Once you become a professional, to get through a ballet like 'Swan Lake' - four acts as the lead, changing character - the perseverance is incredible. It takes a lot to make it through and keep the same energy throughout the entire performance.
The value of life is not in its duration, but in its donation. You are not important because of how long you live, you are important because of how effective you live. And most people are concerned about growing old rather than being effective.
A promise is a commitment to do something later, and a vow is a binding commitment to begin doing something now and to continue to do it for the duration of the vow. Some vows, or contracts, are for life; others are for limited periods of time.
We each were endowed at birth with a unique gift, something we were born to do or become that no one else can achieve the way we can. God's purpose is that we bear abundant fruit and release the blessings of our gift and potential to the world.
The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.
There is a difference between WISHING for a thing and being READY to receive it. No one is ready for a thing, until he believes he can acquire it. The state of mind must be BELIEF, not mere hope or wish. Open-mindedness is essential for belief.
Nothing can happen, nothing can occur in your life which is not a precisely perfect opportunity for you to heal something, create something, or experience something that you wish to heal, create, or experience in order to be who you really are.
Words may help you understand something, but experience allows you to know. Never ever trade your own experience for someone else's words about anything that is really important... like God, for instance, or Love, or what is true about another.
The purpose of meditation is to create focus. It is about focusing your attention on your experience. The reason for focus: it allows you to be here now. Your only reality is This Moment, right here, right now. Peace is found in such awareness.
Go ahead and do what you really love to do! Do nothing else! You have so little time. How can you think of wasting a moment doing something for a living you don't like to do? What kind of a living is that? That is not a living, that is a dying!
Tomorrow's God says that every church is 'his church,' and every faith is 'her faith,' and every soul is God's soul, because it shares the same soul with God! .. And no person or living thing in the universe stands outside the community of God.
He felt her heart beating against his chest. The moment began to transmute, and he wondered if there was something he should do. He wondered if he should kiss her. He wondered if he wanted to kiss her, and he realized that he truly didn't know.
Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there. It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.
A truly extraordinary work: vivid, passionate and utterly compelling. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is raw as a wound. It opens a world that is strange, brutal and poetic at once and ultimately achieves the kind of spirit-healing few novels do
Los Angeles is more hospitable to writers [Than NY]. It's less claustrophobic. It feels more unpredictable and dangerous, and the landscape is less structured. You see coyotes lurking all over the place. It just feels wilder and more dangerous.
There are days when I should be writing, and I am so tired that I can't. And the fatigue also affects my emotions, making me not even care about writing. There are days when I wake up so angry I can barely speak, and also days when I am so sad.
Ah, this is fine," he cried triumphantly, holding up a small medallion on a chain. He dusted it off, and engraved on one side were the words "WHY NOT?" "That's a good reason for almost anything - a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.
Who would have ever heard of Theodore Roosevelt outside of his immediate community if he had only half committed himself? The great secret of his career was that he has flung his whole life with all the determination and energy he could muster.
Most of us are at war with ourselves, are our own worst enemies. We expect a great deal of ourselves, yet we do not put ourselves in a condition to achieve great things. We are either too indulgent to our bodies, or we are not indulgent enough.
Give me strength, not to be better than my enemies, but to defeat my greatest enemy, the doubts within myself. Give me strength for a straight back and clear eyes, so when life fades, as the setting sun, my spirit may come to you without shame.
Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'
I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.
For too many of our citizens, Christianity has become entwined with the ecstatic worship of the gun and violence. For the adherents, there is no compassion, no love thy neighbor, no peace, no reason, and God only helps those who arm themselves.
We need to have a paradigm shift in our consciousness. If we don't get our act together and come in commonality and understanding with the organisms that sustain us today, not only will we destroy those organisms, but we will destroy ourselves.
Mycologists are few and far between. We are under-funded, poorly represented in the context of other sciences - ironic, as the very foundation of our ecosystems are directly dependent upon fungi, which ultimately create the foundation of soils.
The fact is, the cocktail party has much in its favor. Going to one is a good way of indicating that you're still alive and about, if such is the case, and that you're glad other people are, without having to spend an entire evening proving it.
For me, it was the early independent era of AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Daniel Bryan that inspired me and they were in sports halls and grimy little venues having fantastic wrestling matches and that's what appealed to me about wrestling at the time.
During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned - not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value.
A business is not defined by its name, statutes, or articles of incorporation. It is defined by the business mission. Only a clear definition of the mission and purpose of the organization makes possible clear and realistic business objectives.
The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today's society.
A unique relationship develops among team members who enter into dialogue regularly. They develop a deep trust that cannot help but carry over to discussions. They develop a richer understanding of the uniqueness of each person's point of view.
Mike Stanton is our preeminent aficionado and raconteur of Rhode Island’s flamboyantly criminal political follies, and The Prince of Providence is the chronicle of a great American rogue, Mayor Buddy Cianci—a paragon of charisma and corruption.
Oh, princes thrive on caviar, the poor on whey and curds, / And politicians, I infer, must eat their windy words. / It's crusts that feed the virtuous, it's cake that comforts sinners, / But writers live on bread and praise at Literary Dinners.
Apostasy occurs when a church leaves its historic moorings, abandons its historic confessional position, and degenerates into a state where either essential Christian truths are blatantly denied or the denial of such truths is widely tolerated.
If life's journey be endless where is its goal? The answer is, it is everywhere. We are in a palace which has no end, but which we have reached. By exploring it and extending our relationship with it we are ever making it more and more our own.
The expectation was that 'True Confessions' would be my first published book, but that didn't happen. After it was rejected by every publisher in New York and Canada, I shoved it in a closet and went on to write and publish my next three books.
Was it probably true that reasoning beings were equal? It seemed more like a belief than a fact, even if I agreed with it. If you followed logic all the way back to its origin, did you inevitably end up at point of illogic, an article of faith?
Just as a gardener must tend his or her plot, keeping out the weeds, you must tend the garden of your mind, weeding out the thoughts of lack, limitation, and negativity. You must nurture and tend the thoughts of happiness, success, and purpose.
You cannot really have the world and hold on to it. It is all too temporary and the more you try to hold on to it, the more it actually holds you. By contrast, the more you hold on to the true and the good, the more you are free to really live.