Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Why didn't children ever see that they could damage and harm their parents as much as parents could damage and harm children?
Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text.
We are born to trouble; and we may depend upon it, whilst we live in this world, we shall have it, though with intermissions.
Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.
I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!
An action doesn't have to be wrong just because it is not logical. It doesn't have to be right just because it has its logic.
The world's waistlines are expanding, but it's an epidemic of a larger issue in terms of our bounty having become our burden.
Living, just by itself - what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you.
I was thinking what a curious thing love is; only a sentiment, and yet it has power to make fools of men and slaves of women.
Here it is, 2011, and I feel zero shame when I tell you I would like to marry my smartphone. It is a handful of pure delight.
It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.
Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.
L'adolescence est le seul temps o u' l'on ait appris quelque chose. Adolescence is the only time when we can learn something.
For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.
What I object to in Mother is that she wants me to think her thoughts. Apart from the question of hypocrisy, I prefer my own.
Grandmother belongs to the generation of women who were satisfied to have men retain their vices, if they removed their hats.
If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie
I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.
I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are.
I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.
America is a very special place. In this country, you have the best and the worst at the same time. Whatever you can imagine.
The day a character becomes predictable is the day a writer should think about moving on - because the reader certainly will.
I take all the best parts of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, and combine them into a whole new service called … YouTwit-face.
He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.
They gave themselves up to the stars the way swimmers can surrender to the waves, and the stars took them without resistance.
We're not big on irony in Jamaica, sarcasm and double-talk. We tend to say things plainly, sometimes to the point of boredom.
. . . the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.
The moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding places.
With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.
My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge.
Look at the sky; remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity in order to see the smallness of yourself.
How clear can I put this? I am not denying female oppression; I am trying to stop it by calling for a more fluid masculinity.
The weirdest thing about a mind is that you can have the most intense things going on in there, but no one else can see them.
When Germany and England and America will long have lost their present identity or purpose, we shall still be strong in ours.
But you must be patient and careful; nor should you expect to become an accomplished archer without long and severe training.
...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.
The reason for the unreason with which you treat my reason , so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.
She wanted, with her fickleness, to make my destruction constant; I want, by trying to destroy myself, to satisfy her desire.
All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.
But my thoughts ran a wool-gathering; and I did like the countryman, who looked for his ass while he was mounted on his back.
If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.
I wish I had the gift of making rhymes, for methinks there is poetry in my head and heart since I have been in love with you.
If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
This dull river has a deep religion of its own; so, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though, perhaps, unconsciously.
in all the years we spend together, I never once regretted the fact that I had chosen her and that she had chosen me as well.
He was from a different class, too poor, and they would never approve if their daughter became serious with someone like him.
Or maybe watching you enjoy a carefree summer while you fell in love was what kept me out of the hospital in the first place.
I'm simply pointing out that what happens to us isn't the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we're not together.
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.