Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life. Looking up at the ancient impassive faces, Kerans could understand the curious fear they roused, rekindling archaic memories of the terrifying jungles of the Paleocene, when the reptiles had gone down before the emergent mammals, and sense the implacable hatred one zoological class feels towards another that usurps it.
I think what is probably hard for people to imagine is how wrapped up the 17 years' work on Harry Potter is with what was going on in my life at the time. I was mourning the loss of this world that I had written for so long and loved so much. I was also mourning the retreat it had been from - from ordinary life, which it has been. And it forced me to look back at 17 years of my life and remember things.
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.
Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him-he may be forced to-but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.
I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens.
Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be may
The truth is that life is hard and dangerous; that he who seeks his own happiness does not find it; that he who is weak must suffer; that he who demands love will be disappointed; that he who is greedy will not be fed; that he who seeks peace will find strife; that truth is only for the brave; that joy is only for him who does not fear to be alone; that life is only for the one who is not afraid to die.
I don't speak any languages well enough to make an expert assessment on writing in translation, but since I'm interested in awkwardness in prose, I find I like the way translated texts can sometimes acquire awkwardness in the process of translation. There's a discordance translation can create which I think is sometimes seen as a weakness but which I think can be a really interesting aspect of the text.
I didn't learn how to read and write until pretty late, and it was this very mysterious, incredible thing, like driving, that I didn't get to do. And then I started writing things down on little scraps of paper and I would hide them. I would write the year on them and then I would stuff them in a drawer somewhere. But I didn't start to really read until about eight. I'm dyslexic, so it took a long time.
And yet day and night meet fleetingly at twilight and dawn," he said, lowering his voice again and narrowing his eyes and moving his head a quarter of an inch closer to hers. "And their merging sometimes affords the beholder the most enchanted moments of all the twenty four hours. A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.
leaning in he kissed her gently, first on the cheek then on her lips. When he met her eyes, she saw the young man shed loved last summer and the young man she still loved now. "I never stopped loving you, Ronnie. and I never stopped thinking about you. even if summers do come and end" she smiled knowing he was telling the truth. "I love you too, Will Blakelee" she wispered, leaning in to kiss him again.
Look at all the things that can go wrong for men. There’s the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there’s the size-doesn’t-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem…and what do women have to worry about? A handful of cellulite? Join the club. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank? Ditto.
I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn't about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.
What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.
At night, in the garden, it occurs to you that it might have been your heart that left you as you reached the capital. Your heart might not have travelled well, closed up in its cavity, quivering and gnawing at the bars of your ribcage during the commute. It might be tracking north now, along edgelands, past spoil-heaps and stands of pylons, under motorway passes, back to the higher ground. Back to him.
There are millions of white Americans today who still can barely bring themselves to acknowledge that the Civil War, with its twin Americas locked in a death match, was about slavery. They'll argue it was about economics, and they're right only because one of those economies was a slave economy. They'll argue it was about culture, and they're right only because one of those cultures was a slave culture.
I feel that there are two kinds of writers. I feel that there are writers who are storytellers and then there are those just working out their obsessions. I think I'm a combination. I think, at least for these books, I'm going with fear. I've always been interested in fear. Fear is something I've dealt with in life, and I think it's the main motivating factor of everything, almost. From sex to politics.
I don't think anything ever "needs" to happen. I don't think it's more positive to have a Twitter account, a Tumblr, and a blog. Someone without those things will use their time to do other things, like read books or swim or talk to their children or read websites or listen to music or write books or lie in bed or sit in a chair. I don't think any of these things are more positive than any other things.
Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.
It is at least scientifically respectable to postulate that at the centre of a black hole the laws of nature no longer apply. Since most scientists are just a bit religious and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole while his religious intellect believes in them outside it.
One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond at the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principal gum bubble, mole, or birth ward, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.
In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that’s just ridiculous. It’s as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it’s for a reason.
I don't go into hysterics or anything, but I look around for something to smash it with. I used to live out in the country when I first moved here, and there were a lot of centipedes in the house, and I set out to kill them all. A program of genocide. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, and I'd know there's a centipede in this room. And there always was. And I couldn't go to sleep until I killed it.
I had a tough childhood, yes. I was born in rural Bangladesh to parents who had had no education beyond high school. We moved to the UK where I grew up in poverty, in some of the worst conditions in a developed economy, before moving to the projects - heaven - and I went to unremarkable schools before going to university. My father was a bus conductor first and then a waiter, and my mother a seamstress.
Our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.
The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.
As young people we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we'd planned as children - a life of constant dashing around.
The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.
Lies About Love We are all liars, because The truth of yesterday becomes a lie tomorrow, Whereas letters are fixed, and we live by the letter of truth. The love I feel for my friend, this year, is different from the love I felt last year. If it were not so, it would be a lie. Yet we reiterate love! love! love! as if it were a coin with fixed value instead of a flower that dies, and opens a different bud.
It has become a kind of religion that you can't criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not. It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests ... Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did.
It is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience has brought us is worth our personal share of pain. The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength. We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than painters or musicians can wish to return to their cruder manner, or philosophers to their less complete formulas.
Sunrays, leaning on our southern hills and lighting Wild cloud-mountains that drag the hills along, Oft ends the day of your shifting brilliant laughter Chill as a dull face frowning on a song. Ay, but shows the South-west a ripple-feathered bosom Blown to silver while the clouds are shaken and ascend Scaling the mid-heavens as they stream, there comes a sunset Rich, deep like love in beauty without end.
While still sixteen I am put in charge of a class of forty children who are two, three or four years younger than I. I fall in love with them. They are my possession, my mob whose forty minds, under my flashy and domineering control, are to become one, a mind unsullied by errors, unmarked by blots, contaminated by misplaced originalities outside the curriculum, and as full of facts as a pomegranate seed.
Can't stay long, Mother," he said. "I'm up front, the prefects have got two compartments to themselves-" "Oh, are you a prefect, Percy?" said one of the twins, with an air of great surprise. "You should have said something, we had no idea." "Hang on, I think I remember him saying something about it," said the other twin. "Once-" "Or twice-" "A minute-" "All summer-" "Oh, shut up," said Percy the Prefect.
Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write this book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom...Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce's imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.
Phury knelt beside him and stroked his face. "I've only ever had you to live for. If you die I have nothing. I'm utterly lost. And you are needed here." Zsadist tried to reach out, but couldn't lift his arms as Phury stood up. "God, Z, I keep thinking this tragedy of ours is going to be over. But it just keeps going, doesn't it?" Zsadist blacked out to the sound of his twin's boots heading from the room.
Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped. ‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like— many years from now.
As an individual with my own hurts, I go into the Garden (Gethsemane) as often as I need to. There I identify with the pain in the other, with my part in that pain, my part in tempting someone to wound me. I experience the other's pain, and God's pain, and am devastated - because their pain becomes my own. Feeling such anguish, I can forgive, or deeply repent, either for myself or on behalf of the other.
He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.
I think political situations usually work their way into my writing, but not necessarily in an explicit way. The environment is so chaotic now. There is someone so entirely unreliable in charge, and reliable only in the fact that Thing - I don't say his name - is a pathological narcissist. He's going to do whatever he can to defend himself and whatever will make him look good. That's what matters to him.
Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us from.
That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.
Interference is a terrific page-turner, but it's also a haunting, powerful look at the way families and friendships entangle us all. Berry is a sharp-eyed, engaging writer, and she deftly captures the terrors, ruptures and intimacies of one seemingly ordinary neighborhood, always finding a precarious beauty in her characters' lives. This is a book that is terrifying, startling, and very hard to put down.
Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can't help at all. It's just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There's nothing you're ever going to say that's going to make anybody happy when they're feeling shitty about losing somebody that they love.
The women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it’s not a one-way thing. Leola and I, when romance was stripped away, were too much alike; our strengths and weaknesses were too nearly the same. Together we would have doubled our gains and our losses, but that isn’t what love is.
Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,' he had said. 'You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.
I never thought that it would take me so long to do something. I thought everything was temporary and sometimes the best thing you have working in your favor is a bad sense of time. In order to sit down and write a book that takes six years you have to have a screwed up sense of time because that's too daunting. No one is going to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say, "Okay, six years, here we go."
I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.