Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them.
You know, I was gutting this loser the other day, and I thought, It’d be more fun fighting that little dhampir. I wonder if she’s recovered yet. And here you are.” “Lucky me,” I said. Scarface grinned. “You know, I might even let you live. You’re funny.
Astana has been the capital of Kazakhstan only since 1997, three years after Nazarbayev told a stunned parliament that a prosperous, independent country like Kazakhstan ought to have its capital 'in the center' of the country, rather than on the border.
Surely, 'tis one step towards acting well, to think worthily of our nature; and as in common life, the way to make a man honest, is, to suppose him soso here, to set some value upon ourselves, enables us to support the characterof generosity and virtue.
I imagine witches to be people who sit around like my witty grandmother, people who are injustice collectors or humiliation collectors. I choose to imagine that's what a witch is. The reason witches are so evil is because they're so unhappy and so hurt.
Gentlemen, be courteous to the old maids, no matter how poor and plain and prim, for the only chivalry worth having is that which is the readiest to to pay deference to the old, protect the feeble, and serve womankind, regardless of rank, age, or color.
I think immortality is the passing of a soul through many lives or experiences, and such as are truly lived, used and learned, help on to the next, each growing richer, happier and higher, carrying with it only the real memories of what has gone before.
Now, as a writer, the whole world is your nail polish display, and what's more, you can help yourself. A thrilling, colourful array of gorgeous human peculiarity revolves before your eyes, and you still can't quite believe it's all yours for the taking.
World War II put feminism on hold for a long time; the men went away to fight, a lot of women in those years got jobs both in teaching and in factories - at all social levels - which they enjoyed very much. A lot of them were quite happy during the war.
That's right,' she told the girls. 'You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.
Fame, or notoriety, whichever that special noise may be called when the world like a hound 'gives tongue' and announces that the quarry in some form of genius is at bay, is apt to increase its clamor in proportion to the aloofness of the pursued animal.
Of course there's pressure, and it's still there with every book. Each one is harder to write than the last, basically because you're always trying to write a better book. You won't always succeed, of course, but that has to be what you're shooting for.
House-training, I must tell you, is a formality that can elude young dachshunds for some time; this is particularly true in climates that affront their sensibilities with outrageous meteorological insults. Rain, for example, or a startling gust of wind.
Shall I tell you why young men love war? . . . In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one question with one right answer. . . . Going to war makes you a man. It is emotionally exciting and morally restful.
Women's courage is rather different from men's. The fact that women have to bring up children and look after husbands makes them braver at facing long-term issues, such as illness. Men are more immediately courageous. Lots of people are brave in battle.
She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.
They must take me for a fool, or even worse, a lunatic. And no wonder ,for I am so intensely conscious of my misfortune and my misery is so overwhelming that I am powerless to resist it and am being turned into stone, devoid of all knowledge or feeling.
Women joked amongst themselves: 'Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It's for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past- "you were born and then I married you"- but men are fools.
Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, and two minds conscious of the same thought, but as long as it remains unspoken their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea.
When you're a confused 19-year-old filled with questions you can't even articulate and a kind of black rage that feeds at your heart from the moment you wake up in the morning, and you discover Marcus Aurelius' 'The Meditations,' that changes your life.
And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive.
And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.
...You can find people. It's like those acrobatic displays.... Those ones when you stand on top of loads of people in a pyramid. It doesn't really matter who they are, as long as they're there and you don't let them go away without finding someone else.
There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have passed away like a tale that is told.
I think that's the thing that memoir can do more than anything it does; it testifies and bears witness to the existence of people whose lives, pleasures and virtues would never have been testified to without my having done it. That makes me really glad.
The dead think they can get away with anything because you'll feel sorry for them. If you play cards with the dead, make sure you deal and don't let them buy you drinks. They'll slip you a formaldehyde roofie and pry the gold fillings out of your teeth.
Bunkum and tummyrot! You'll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he'd said 'What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?' He wouldn't even have started.
I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.
People have been saying the novel is dead for as far back as I can remember. The novel will never die, but it will keep changing and evolving and taking different shapes. Storytelling, which is the basis of the novel, has always existed and always will.
It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.
The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, 'What do you think?' I hope that you think well of it, obviously.
I certainly know all about the Jersey jokes that amuse the rest of the country. You've probably heard them. Our state bird is the mosquito. Our state tree is dead. It doesn't help that we are represented on television by Tony Soprano and 'Jersey Shore.'
I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.
I thought I dreamed you." The words whisper from my parched throat. His head tilts to one side, his mouth shifting to something less sarcastic, more amused. "That may be the most enchanting thing I've ever been told after spending the night with a girl.
I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living--and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known.
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.
I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.
Everything - our houses, our clothes, our hairstyles - is meant to help us forget ourselves and to protect us from vanity, greed and envy, which are just forms of selfishness. If we have little, and want for little, and we are all equal, we envy no one.
People, I have discovered, are layers and layers of secrets. You believe you know them, that you understand them, but their motives are always hidden from you, buried in their own hearts. You will never know them, but sometimes you decide to trust them.
The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.
We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.
I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and round and never comes out, but because it's an extraordinary picture of ceaseless change that never comes to an end.
Perhaps there is no greater test of a man's regularity and easiness of conscience than his readiness to face the postman. Blessed is he who is made happy by the sound of a rat-tat! The good are eager for it; but the naughty tremble at the sound thereof.
If this advertisement be not sufficient, I can only protrude my wormlike tendrils of apology, craving forbearance on the grounds that a writer must write about what he knows, and since I know nothing about any subject it scarcely matters where I dabble.
Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.
There is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation!... A human being, Hastings, cannot resist theopportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away.
If you want to change the world, who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.