Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths.
Let none count themselves wise who have not with the nerves of their imagination felt the pain of the vivisected.
The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
Class has always been Tom Wolfe's subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held.
He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.
Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7
Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.
The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.
Teach the legal rights of trees, the nobility of hills; respect the beauty of singularity, the value of solitude.
Then you must be willing to fight," Mircea responded. "Life is not a gift, Raphael; it's a challenge. Rise to it!
I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard.
Of course mothers and daughters with strong personalities might see the world from very different points of view.
Modern sport can be an ugly convergence of commerce and celebrity, but it still has the capacity to move a crowd.
Mothers smell blood before the wound is given. We see the rent place on the child's arm before the arrow strikes.
Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.
There are some things in life that shouldn't be given so much importance, if they don't change what is essential.
I'm a writer, not an actor. I want to write rather than perform. I'm looking forward to disappearing for a while.
Whatever stress some may lay upon it, a death-bed repentance is but a weak and slender plank to trust our all on.
Go, poor devil, get thee gone! Why should I hurt thee? This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.
To be homeward bound, no matter what tragic memories you have harbored, is unlike any voyage a man can ever make.
I was the kind of child who always poked around wherever there was fear: to see what kind of a creature fear was.
I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.
I'm getting better, happier, and nicer as I grow older, so I would be terrific in a couple of hundred years time.
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
In my country we say that ignorance is the warm bath in which it is comfortable to sit but dangerous to lie down.
And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end
Bigotry is ever the child of ignorance, and the cultivation of the understanding is the only radical cure for it.
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.
How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!
Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.
There are writers I know and respect who are very good about what's outside, and not too hot about what's inside.
But there's no emergency kit for marriage. No neat plan you can turn to when the ground shifts beneath your feet.
A knight errant who turns mad for a reason deserves neither merit nor thanks. The thing is to do it without cause
There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things.
Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable.
The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule.
There are people who are so full of common sense that they haven't the slightest cranny left for their own sense.
Houses are like books: so many of them around you, yet you only look at a few and visit or reside in fewer still.
As a visual storyteller, a lot is learning what to include so you're not being redundant between images and text.
That's the thing about life. A lot of the time, it isn't easy at all. We just have to try to make the best of it.
It was, I remembered thinking, the most difficult walk anyone ever had to make. In every way, a walk to remember.
We’d met at a carefree time, a moment full of promise, in its place now were the harsh lessons of the real world.
I can say that I don't have a lot of leisure time, just sitting around doing absolutely nothing, but that's okay.
Two cannibals were eating a comedian, and one of them turns to the other and asks, 'Does this taste funny to you?