Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are only so many plots in the world. It's how they unfold that makes them interesting.
Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?
Without doubt half the ethical rules they din into our ears are designed to keep us at work.
All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head.
Jo had learned that hearts, like flowers, cannot be rudely handled, but must open naturally.
Laurie felt just then that his heart was entirely broken and the world a howling wilderness.
Shouldn't the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?
You're lucky if people like your book, and the more people that like it, the luckier I feel.
For a long time I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]
Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.
Books are like sapphires; they must be polished - polished! or else you insult your readers.
Do I mind being called a chick-lit writer? Well, it's not the worst thing that could happen.
That's one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don't let them.
I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.
Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.
As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.
I've never had a cup of coffee in my life. I can't even remain in the same room with coffee.
We shouldn't romanticize rejection. There's nothing romantic about rejection. It's horrible.
Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
I think Father Christmas is real because the belief is real. The belief becomes the reality.
You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can’t give yourself
Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
I wonder if our names determine our destiny, or if destiny leads us to choose certain names.
Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.
I had my success too soon. Three books published with Scribners in New York before I was 30.
Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow.
I'll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world." - Paloma
That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.
Final perseverance is the doctrine that wins the eternal victory in small things as in great
Power, privilege, and violence are not, and never were, strictly Southern issues in America.
Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen.
Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time.
The emotions attached to them were like sand castles in the tide, slowly washing out to sea.
Consider yourself lucky for having met him, for he's the kind of man who'll prove you right.
His voice, even now, follows me everywhere on this longest of rides, this thing called life.
I don't pray because it doesn't work. Prayer doesn't fix anything. Bad things happen anyway.
Most people lived their lives like criminals: act first, worry about the consequences later.
Novels are very different than films and I love to see someone else's imagining of my story.
She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.
For just experience tells, in every soil, That those that think must govern those that toil.
While selfishness joins hands with no one of the virtues, benevolence is allied to them all.
A flattering painter, who made it his care To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are.
The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade, For talking age and whispering lovers made.
As for disappointing them I should not so much mind; but I can't abide to disappoint myself.
Here lies David Garrick, describe me who can, An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man.
By sports like these are all their cares beguil'd; The sports of children satisfy the child.
The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.
To have a choice at all is to be free - even when the choice is between two terrible things.
I don't know why people who got what they need to be happy don't just go ahead and be happy.