Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are few states, I suppose, which exact so severe a toll from one's nervous system as the anticipation of calamity.
The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even.
As a writer, I don't think it's my responsibility to make a point. I just write and hope there's someone who'll like it.
Though I am a Catholic, a professing one, I have serious doubts about the survival of the human personality after death.
As an only child, I may have been alone a lot, but I was never lonely. My invisible friends were my constant companions.
I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.
Maybe I’m weak for music men. Maybe I’m weak, period. But I couldn’t deny I was charmed by his arrogant, fool-ish guise.
I still maintain that an ordinary human being has the right to be horrified by a mangled body seen on an afternoon walk.
I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.
It's not that I ever sat down and outlined a trilogy, but I always have a sense of what size an idea is when I start it.
The Dauthless have the wierdest slang. Pansycake, Nose...is there a term for The Candor?" "Of course."Uriah grins."Jerks
Candor does not provide us with protection, sustenance, or technological innovation. Therefore you are expendable to us.
On the whole, I don't like reading long books. I'm not a fan of 'Ulysses.' And I haven't quite finished 'War and Peace.'
I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.
To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.
The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.
Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others
I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.
Life is too transcendentally humorous for a man not to take it seriously. Compared with it, Death is but a shallow jest.
The instant people specialize, it's in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.
I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting.
So whatever else has happened, I am figgerin this: I can always look back an say, at least I ain't led no hum-drum life.
When a soul is created, so is its mate. In every lifetime those souls find each other. They complete the other's destiny.
My chest expanded and I suddenly wanted to beat on it with my fist. The girl was making me go all caveman." -Marcus Hardy
Blaire, even if all we do is kiss or just lay there and talk, I'm okay with that. I just wanted you up here. Close to me.
Is she forever for you then? She's worth throwing it all away?" "She's it. No one else. She's all I'm ever going to want.
marriage is an extraordinary thing - and I doubt if any outsider - even a child of the marriage - has the right to judge.
The trouble with you and me, is that we don't live in the real world. We dream of fantastic things that may never happen.
Self-preservation's a man's first duty. And natives don't mind dying, you know. They don't feel about it as Europeans do.
Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot.
No Time For Goodbye is a deliciously smart thriller, full of surprises and perfect pacing. I'm jealous I didn't write it.
she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.
By comparing what we know today with what the ancients appear to have known we can guess at the kinds of wine they drank.
As for Europe, its claims towards Russia are fairly transparently based on fears about energy, unjustified fears at that.
After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction
I think of how perhaps the best way to fly would be with hands full of earth, so you always remember where you came from.
I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.
I have next to no interest in makeup as a thing in and of itself, and nothing stresses me out like Sephora's salespeople.
Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.
All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don't win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.
Yet, should thy darkest fears be true, If Heaven be so severe, That such a soul as thine is lost, Oh! how shall I appear?
This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.
These days cry out, as never before, for us to pay attention, so we can move through them and get our joy and pride back.
I am skittish about relationships, as most of the marriages I've seen up close have been ruinous for one or both parties.
The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning
For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.
Routine is the one thing the can get you killed. It tells the enemy where you're going and when you're going to be there.
Men and not measures are, no doubt, the very life of politics. But then it is not the fashion to say so in public places.
You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.
When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.