Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We have, instead (of soot and dirt), disorganization. We have this proliferation of goods. It's the disease of the time.
I am an advocate of honesty and openness, and I think deceit is a dangerous seed to plant and let grow in relationships.
Honorable retreats are no ways inferior to brave charges, as having less fortune, more of discipline, and as much valor.
Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.
Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't.
If nothing else, there's comfort in recognising that no matter how much we fail and sin, death will limit our suffering.
But I know how this romantic stuff works: one girl's perfect guy is another girl's reject. And right now I'm glad of it.
If I have three ideas and I'm working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.
It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad.
Sometimes, if you aren't sure about something, you just have to jump off the bridge and grow your wings on the way down.
I'm astonished by my success. I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I'd become famous.
You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
It doesn't matter who you are, how many awards you've won, how popular you are, or how much critical acclaim you've had.
Find the thing you love, and do it with all your heart, to the absolute best of your ability, no matter what people say.
Topaz was wonderfully patient - but sometimes I wonder if it is not only patience, but also a faint resemblance to cows.
There are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.
Knee-Jerk Irony: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.
The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.
Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.
Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.
Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.
I don't want all that much. But I want to be fine. I want to live a simple life with many good moments and a lot of fun.
I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.
Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.
We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.
Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.
We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.
Of course I shall go astray often...for who does not make mistakes? But I cannot go far wrong for I have seen the truth.
Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.
She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .
Some things arrive in their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.
The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.
To what better purpose can a man's energy be devoted, and his talents, than the resuscitation of his country's language?
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.
No matter whether failure came A thousand different times, For one brief moment of success, Life rang its golden chimes.
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.
We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.
Ideas are cheap. I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. To my mind, it's the execution that is all-important.
As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen.
She should be on a hill somewhere, under a fruit tree, with the sun and clouds above her and the rain to wash her clean.
I'm fond of all my characters so every time one doesn't make the cut I'm a little disappointed although I understand it.
The most honest of men is the one who thinks and acts best, but the most powerful is the one who writes and speaks best.
Fame and admiration weigh not a feather in the scale against friendship and love, for the heart languishes all the same.
I like people. I like watching them. It's just that I'd prefer to do it from a mile away using very powerful binoculars.