Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Lord make me satisfied with small things. Make me content to live on the outside of life. God make me love the rind!
Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.
It may be taken for granted that, rash as Americans usually are, when they are prudent, there is good reason for it.
When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.
Goodbyes are on of the hardest things about life. One way or another people were always leaving... Always moving on.
Therapists have tremendous power over their vulnerable clients, and it is very easy to take advantage of this power.
It is sacrilege to attempt analysis of birth or love or death. Death and birth, the mysteries! Love, the revelation!
The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.
Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.
The Scandinavians are dear people but they've never been what you might call bywords for wit and sparkle, have they?
Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.
Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.
Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?
It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built
I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sun-baked lands where there is no frost in men's bones.
But, Polly, a principle that can't bear being laughed at, frowned on, and cold-shouldered, isn't worthy of the name.
So she enjoyed herself heartily, and found, what isn't always the case, that her granted wish was all she had hoped.
What I've learned is that you get better at writing by writing, and that 'youthful energy' will only get you so far.
Any writer knows that what's left out is as essential, if not more so, than what's there. Unlearning works that way.
Happiness is knowing and appreciating what you've got. I am very, very, very grateful for what, to me, is dead easy.
Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.
I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.
A hotel is a hotel all the world over, a place essentially vulgar, commonplace, venal, the travesty of a human home.
For everybody knows that it requires very little to satisfy the gentlemen, if a woman will only give her mind to it.
My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.
In the 1970s, there was a trend for all detectives on TV to have some quirk or gimmick, and this was often physical.
I've always been interested in what passes for what we call religion, what other cultures call their spiritual life.
I'm not a writer on a mission, and I'm very suspicious of writers on missions, but I'm also not living a false life.
My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.
Perhaps she was just looking for love in the wrong places. In all the safe places. What if love was not safe at all?
Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next.
I had a doctorate in biological anthropology. I got a post-doc at CWRU dental school in 1983 teaching gross anatomy.
I sometimes think it's a mistake to have been happy when one was a child. One should always want to go on, not back.
When someone loves you, there's nothing they won't do for you. When they stop loving you, there's nothing they will.
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
I got my first book deal when I was in college, but it was published in Germany, and I could never actually read it.
Once a woman parts with her virtue, she loses the esteem even of the man whose vows and tears won her to abandon it.
Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.
The memories of long love gather like drifting snow, poignant as the mandarin ducks who float side by side in sleep.
In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.
Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.
Then we'll find a way to work through all this together because I know I want to spend the rest of my life with you.
I am not commanding you, but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it to the earnestness of others.
Sprawled out on the front lawn Looking up at an ordinary sky It could fall on me and somehow be The day I didn't die
I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy.
Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.
Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it.
Philosophy ... should not pretend to increase our present stock, but make us economists of what we are possessed of.
A kind and gentle heart he had, To comfort friends and foes; The naked every day he clad When he put on his clothes.