Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music.
With the word creative we stand under a mystery. And from time to time that mystery, as if it were a sun, sends down upon one head or another, a sudden shaft of light - by grace, one feels, rather than deserving, for it always is something given, free, unsought, unexpected.
I sat down and wrote, 'Are your emotions pure? Are they the stuff of heroes or the alloyed mess of the beaten? How do you stand in relation to the potato?' And it was a lot of fun, and I kept going and woke up at some point in some horror that I had about 142 pages of this.
What I would really love to happen to me would be if I came upon an idea that would keep me busy until I die so I wouldn't have to go through the business of thinking up a new book. But I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.
She goes where she pleases. She appears unhoped for, uncalled for. She moves through doors and walls and windows. Her thoughts move through minds. She enters dreams. She vanishes and is still there. She knows the future and sees through flesh. She is not afraid of anything.
As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make - 'derive' - and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?
Theres a lot to be said for doing what youre not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what youre supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.
I have found it impossible to talk to anyone about my problems. I couldn't face the embarrassment, and anyway I lack the courage. Any courage I had was knocked out of me when I was young. But now, all of sudden I have a sort of desperate wish to tell everything to somebody.
I can't get very excited about the House of Commons these days because I don't feel the power is there. What is really bizarre is that you sense it is not in Washington either. It is now very hard even to locate the levers of power, let alone to pull them and change things.
There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well.
The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. And that depends on your age, your experience, your psychological and spiritual need.
I love whimsy. My mother was a word person, a real quipster. She was famous in the 1950s for being a contester in Utah: 25 words or less. My bicycle, our hi-fi... in 1959, she won $15,000 from Remington-Rand for writing about a shaver. She was a farm girl from South Dakota.
It's not my intention to be understood. I will continue writing for a readership that is fundamentally local. Because if you want to produce universal writing, you run the risk of losing your local knowledge. Your views are so universalist that the street aspect disappears.
We are animals and we are made in this way and this is how we behave. I'm just kind of fascinated by how we can deny that we are animals and what our impact on the other animals is like, and how quixotic we can be in trying to assess what we've done in trying to correct it.
At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery; at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers.
They have poisoned the Thames and killed the fish in the river. A little further development of the same wisdom and science will complete the poisoning of the air, and kill the dwellers on the banks. I almost think it is the destiny of science to exterminate the human race.
I'd have to say that Nixon feels like the public figure who most dominated my life - from the time I went to fourth grade wearing a Nixon-Lodge button in the fall of 1960, through my college years, which overlapped with Kent State, Cambodia, the China trip and all the rest.
If patterns of ones and zeros were 'like' patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?
The U.S. Military is us. There is no truer representation of a country than the people that it sends into the field to fight for it. The people who wear our uniform and carry our rifles into combat are our kids, and our job is to support them, because they're protecting us.
Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: ...she knew there was nothing to fear.
I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.
The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.
I'm a fairly religious person, so I believe in some things that sound a little crazy I'm sure, depending on where you're standing. I believe in leaving room for things that you can't explain in the universe, and you don't have to be religious to leave room for those things.
Ada girl, adored girl, [...] I'm a radiant void. I'm convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.
The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.
It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.
He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it.
Her mother was my wife," the Count roared, loudest of all. "You pathetic excuse for am money-grubbing fool, you disgrace to the face of the world." And with a shriek of disgust he turned and was gone. Guilietta was beside Inigo then, so excited. "Daddy likes you," she said.
But why people need privacy? Why privacy is important? In China, every family live together, grandparents, parents, daughter, son and their relatives too. Eat together and share everything, talk about everything. Privacy make people lonely. Privacy make family fallen apart.
About time, what I really learned from studying English is: time is different with timing. I understand the difference of these two words so well. I understand falling in love with the right person in the wrong timing could be the greatest sadness in a person's entire life.
She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.
The one thing I’d learned was that having someone with you all the time did not take away the loneliness. You could be surrounded by people and be lonely. Something was missing. I could almost pinpoint it, but right when it was within my grasp I forgot; it just slipped away.
The second book was probably the result of the relationship I was in at the time. We were only going to be compatible for a minute, and I think we both knew it. It's like how you can be a different person on vacation, but you know all along you're just visiting that mindset.
They had a contest where they would - for some reason, someone in the past loved musical theater, and so if you wrote a musical, they would fully fund it and put it on the main stage with full costumes and a set and everything, and my roommate said we should totally do that.
I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.
We all have the dark, ignorant shadow inside us. I have worked endlessly to reveal it and heal it in me, but of course there's some primitive weird stuff in me. The Tea Party is about exhorting white supremacy, though, so I've had a tiny bit of trouble experiencing sympathy.
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?
Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.
What I do is, I'm like a disease that infects real people and I take them over. We can start off in a very journalistic mode describing a character and observing a character - and that's what I do with a lot of characters in my books. And then my imagination eats them alive.
I may repeat 'Do as you would be done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God;and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey him.
If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of 'religion.'
After having my baby I felt like I'd been introduced to my life, I slowed down, I paid more attention to simple things, I addressed a few issues in my own life, I even got married, I looked at what was important and what wasn't, and so I used that experience for inspiration.
Somewhere along the way, without me even noticing, I grew up Alex. For once, I couldn’t take advice from anyone around me about what I should or shouldn’t do. I couldn’t go running to mum and dad and I can’t compare my marriage to anybody else’s, we all follow our own rules.
And that is how Goodwin problems were always fixed. Fix them on the surface but don't go to the root, always ignoring the elephant in the room. I think that morning was when I realized I'd grown up with an elephant in every room of my life. It was practically our family pet.
Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time - and maybe it's because I'm an immigrant kid and not white - there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of everything that was going on.
The unmarried woman seldom escapes a widowhood of the spirit. There is sure to be some one, parent, brother, sister, friend, more comfortable to her than the day, with whom her life is so entwined that the wrench of parting leaves a torn void never entirely healed or filled.
Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking. I often feel like I have to go back to that 17-year-old Chris Crutcher, and that forms the core voice. I can draw on teens from 1964 to 2001 to find a part of the voice I need.
In 2004, one of my books, 'Whale Talk,' was chosen as an all-school read in Fowlerville, Michigan, a rural town not far from Detroit. They had done what I thought was a brilliant and innovative thing: decided to teach the book in every discipline, sophomores through seniors.
I'm not really up on what's new. I'm still listening to Run DMC twenty-five years later. In the same way that the baby-boomers in America were forcing '60s music and Motown down our throats, now people of my generation are forcing Tears For Fears and old Hip Hop upon others.
In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.