Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.
He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things.
A careful observation of Nature will disclose pleasantries of superb irony. She has for instance placed toads close to flowers.
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.
What kind of shapeshifter has orange fur anyway?" "Weredingo." Now I'd seen everything. Well, at least he didn't steal my baby.
Why couldn't she have gotten another Edger or some dimwit from the Broken for a passenger? No, she got Lord Leather Pants here.
It was quite life-affirming, for me, that I felt hat kind of pity for [Margaret Thatcher], because I didn't think I ever would.
One may speak about anything on earth with fire, with enthusiasm, with ecstasy, but one only speaks about oneself with avidity.
What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.
But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.
I don't believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.
You can laugh! But people used to believe there were no such things as the Blibbering Humdinger or the Crumple-Horned Snorkack!
Although people rarely died playing Quidditch, referees had been known to vanish and turn up months later in the Sahara Desert.
Prongs rode again last night... You know, Harry, in a way, you did see your father last night... You found him inside yourself.
The first breath of autumn was in the air, a prodigal feeling, a feeling of wanting, taking, and keeping before it is too late.
Butch didn't live in his own place. He didn't spend his own money. He had no job, no future. He was a well-kept pet, not a man.
United by their clasped hands, they became again the two halves, the light and the dark. The Destroyer and the Savior. A whole.
A fine thing to be talking about angels in this day when common thieves smash the holy rosaries of their victims in the street.
I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren't people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.
I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.
One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
Just laws are no restraint upon the freedom of the good, for the good man desires nothing which a just law will interfere with.
I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
Imust have a London audience.I could never preach, but to the educated; to those who were capable of estimating my composition.
Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference between us. Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never.
And we mean to treat you all,' added Lydia, 'but you must lend us the money, for we have just spent ours at the shop out there.
A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.
Sometimes, a word succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, like a virus sent into the world to infect common speech.
I could almost see common sense and denial fighting away at each other within her. In the end, denial won, as it so often does.
...the landscape inside Lord of the Rings was so stunning and so stupendous that it could be absorbed as a form of nourishment.
One of the best possible perspectives from which to tell a story is that of a ghost, someone who is dead but can still witness.
The man who discovers a woman's weakness is like the huntsman in the heat of the day who finds a cool spring. He wallows in it.
To have money is to be virtuous, honest, beautiful and witty And to be without is to be ugly and boring and stupid and useless.
We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.
Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in stayin' On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicide
And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.
Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.
All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.
Well you've been brought here against your will, just like I have. If you ask me, we're all in the same boat. And it's leaking.
Let me begin by saying that I am one of those naturally wary people who considers the verb 'return' a kind of insidious threat.
For a couple of years at the end of the 1970s, Dustin Hoffman was a fixture in our family. My father was his lawyer and friend.
An attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality.