Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I believe the world is as we choose to view it. Simple as that. Our happiness is, in the end, up to us, and to no one else.
Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.
Clearly the sight of a well-muscled forearm incited a woman to utter depravity. How else to explain the invention of cuffs?
What on earth are you wearing? Did you take orders in a convent since we spoke last? Little Sisters of the Drab and Homely.
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
I don't take much notice of reviews now - obviously you'd like to have straight worship but you're never going to get that.
With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.
When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.
The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.
When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.
I don't think one parent can raise a child. I don't think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.
I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*
For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
It looks rather ordinary," said the Snork. "Unless you consider that a top hat is always somewhat extraordinary, of course.
Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?
Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.
Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.
I don't want children. Why should I let some strange little monster into my life to destroy what to me is a perfect set-up?
There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that.
If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money
We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.
I seemed busy, busy, busy, but I suppose, if pressed, I might have admitted that, for all my frenzy, I was very much alone.
"I could give you my word as a Spaniard," Inigo said. "No good," the man in black replied. "I've known too many Spaniards."
Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.
The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
Every man's first declaration of love is bathos--the zenith of his passion connoting perhaps the nadir of his intelligence.
Hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be offended.
I don't have any politics. I feel that as soon as politics arises, things are already in a hopeless state of deterioration.
Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.'
Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
Look closer and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed.
This is where men and women are different, we can put aside petty competition for relationships - they can't. It interferes.
The bereaved had never any doubt about their dear ones' wishes and those wishes usually squared with their own inclinations.
Fey...a Scotch word...It means the kind of exalted happiness that comes before disaster. You know--it's too good to be true.
Margaret thought of all she knew for certain, that day would always follow night that love was never wasted nor was it lost.
He believed in dreams, in endings that people told you could never happen, in disappointments reversed and luck that lasted.
Since 1789 history has had a new perspective, revolution being a successful revolt, and revolt a revolution that has failed.
It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.
Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.
Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.
As every authoritarian regime knows, association can be a dangerous thing. From discussion it is only a few steps to action.
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.
It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.