Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
[...] it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way - otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contray the Christian danger.
I did a lot of this through writing flashbacks. Many of the flashbacks took place at Cal's school and I eventually cut them because they didn't seem essential and they slowed the pace of the story in the first third of the book. They were essential to me, though, in that I learned about my characters.
Westward, beyond the still pleasant, but, even then, no longer solitary, hamlet of Charing, a broad space, broken here and there by scattered houses and venerable pollards, in the early spring of 1467, presented the rural scene for the sports and pastimes of the inhabitants of Westminister and London.
Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.
It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite… The reversal of fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest
Father monks, why do you fast! Why do you expect reward in heaven for that?...No, saintly monk, you try being virtuous in the world, do good to society, without shutting yourself up in a monastery at other people's expense, and without expecting a reward up aloft for it--you'll find that a bit harder.
In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think.
Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
Cough clenched, and vomited something chunky into the grass. Terrific. The big dog sat on his haunches and looked at William with a perplexed expression on his face. "Well, eat it back up," William hissed. "Don't waste it." Cough gave a tiny whine. "I'm not eating your puke." Cough panted at him. "No.
The hardest part about writing fiction is finding long stretches of time to do it: for me, this means writing mostly on Saturdays and Sundays. But I am always thinking about my characters, jotting down ideas in stolen moments and hoping I'll be able to make sense of them when the weekend rolls around.
I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved there had come from places just like Shepperton, and so they built and lived in houses exactly like these. I now know I was drawn here because, on an unconscious level, Shepperton reminds me of Shanghai.
The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous. You know, my fantasy of being a famous writer, and again there's a slight disconnect with reality which happens a lot with me. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
Baseball always gets credit for the foundational part of masculinity - the father thing. The eternal game of backyard catch, 'Field of Dreams', the Ripkens, the Griffeys, the Bondses, so on. But football is the real paternal game, because it's a conveyor belt of father figures, in the form of coaches.
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.
Minds vary in sensitiveness and in self-power, as bodies do in susceptibility of attraction and repulsion. When, when shall we learn that they are governed by laws as inexorable as physical laws, and that a man can as easily refuse to obey what has power over him as a steel atom can resist the magnet?
Do you talk by rule, then, while you are dancing?" Sometimes. One must speak a little, you know. It would look odd to be entirely silent for half an hour together, and yet for the advantage of some, conversation ought to be so arranged as that they may have the trouble of saying as little as possible.
If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred and all duty violated.
I'm no use to anybody,' I say. 'I'm a cérébrale, can't you see that?' Thinking how funny a book would be, called 'Just a Cérébrale or You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming'. Only, of course, to be accepted as authentic, to carry any conviction, it would have to be written by a man. What a pity, what a pity!
The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
I love the perspective afforded by having lived five decades, a degree of bemused and muted calm, a relief from the insistent demands of a turbulent ego and rampant ambition. I'd love to stay here forever. But something tells me that 50 is a sunny idyll, a temporary state of grace, a golden afternoon.
Generally speaking, there's some quality of compulsion that attaches itself to the idea of the list. It's true that lists organise the daily chaos of working life. But the impulse to make lists has to do with something more than either administrative practicalities or the record of a creative process.
I think there's such a fine line in a relationship. The role of imagination and privacy... how much space can you allow before that becomes distance? And similarly, imagination is empathy. That's how you achieve empathy. It's how you can be with another person and understand how they are in the world.
I took one glance at her in that hospital bed under the dull light and recognised the look on her face, which I'd seen on donors often enough before. It was like she was willing her eyes to see right inside herself, so she could patrol and marshal all the better the separate areas of pain in her body.
I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day--that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave.
I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply.
I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.
I think the slowness of exchange is over, and the idea of waiting for a response - that's gone. People don't want to wait. It's all this instantaneity. That's fine. But it also makes writing different, if you're writing for an instant exchange compared with being able to have time for more reflection.
For a writer, mail is not just a collection of bills and letters and offers to subscribe to Sports Illustrated. It's an umbilical cord, a connection to the outside world, the giver of pleasure and pain. It shapes the day, is the moment, inexorable as the tide, toward which all the hours rise and fall.
Thorne blinked at her, then down at the sewage he could barely make out in the darkness. "Don't you have some tool in that fancy hand of yours that can get us across?" Cinder glared, light-headed from her body's instinctively short breaths. "Oh, wow, how could I have forgotten about my grappling hook?
In a place like Israel, they're very concerned with Iran, so there's a lot of interest. So they want to see what this Iranian from France has to say in her comics. I guess that's good. My the books are coming out in other countries. And each time, they discover something different to be interested in.
That's what the left is always doing. They have an ideal, and they want people to conform to it. When people don't conform to it, they end up being beaten into the mold. And beaten sometimes hard enough so that if they don't fit, then they kill them. That's what happened in the Soviet Union and China.
If one accepts Hezbollah's self-description as a resistance movement, in which case one must, in light of the fact that Hezbollah never ceases to provoke, view Israel's mere existence as a continuing act of aggression, then Hezbollah has indeed shown that it can initiate conflict, resist, and survive.
The internet, like social media, seems to me to depend on how you use it, where you spend your time on it. I used to be quite anti-social media, but I can see now that it can be a good tool for artists, a way for us to speak to each other outside of standard economies and across languages and borders.
Love is influenced by no consideration, recognizes no restraints of reason, and is of the same nature as death, that assails alike the lofty palaces of kings and the humble cabins of shepherds; and when it takes entire possession of a heart, the first thing it does is to banish fear and shame from it.
It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.
There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea breaker.
[My novel] took up the sweetest part of my mind and the rarest part of my imagination; it was like being in love and better. All day long when I was busy [...], I had my unfinished novel personified almost as a secret companion and accomplice following me like a shadow wherever I went, whatever I did.
Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.
No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.
That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.
A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.
Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at sending stuff out or feeling that something is ready to send out and I never have been. Part of the problem is that as soon as a poem is finished, it stops being all that interesting to me.
Interacting with other people does not come naturally to me; it is a strain and requires effort, and since it does not come naturally I feel like I am not really myself when I make that effort. I feel fairly comfortable with my family, but even with them I sometimes feel the strain of not being alone.
And then they would watch her closely as the dark, coagulated masses took form before her eyes, became flesh and bone, became gradually human. For all their show of reluctance, she had a sense that they enjoyed introducing her to these horrors, as seducers took pleasure in the corruption of innocence.
O, blackberry tart, with berries as big as your thumb, purple and black, and thick with juice, and a crust to endear them that will go to cream in your mouth, and both passing down with such a taste that will make you close your eyes and wish you might live forever in the wideness of that rich moment.
She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted something to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.
If you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that… Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.
I've always been fascinated, obsessed even, with books and TV shows about unsolved murders, cold cases, forensic science, mysteries, and so on. Many times when I get inspiration for my work, it's from something in one of these books or TV shows, or perhaps some newspaper article about a specific case.
And all the books you've read have been read by other people. And all the songs you've loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that's pretty to you is pretty to other people. and that if you looked at these facts when you were happy, you would feel great because you are describing 'unity.