Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I just hope I remember to tell my kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope that they believe me.
I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.
People always say, 'Write what you know', but I've always found that to be terrible advice. It's quite limiting, what you know.
I warn you all, hatred is finding fertile soil within me. And in your compassion, in your every good intention, you nurture it.
If you don't allow yourself the possibility of writing something very, very bad, it would be hard to write something very good.
I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader.
I wish I could be a grandmother. It is wanton extravagance to have had a youth with no one to tell of it to when one grows old.
when the German propaganda tries to be winsome it is like a clown with homicidal mania - ludicrous and terrifying both at once.
Love is not the absence of logic but logic examined and recalculated heated and curved to fit inside the contours of the heart.
I was delivering pizzas at Domino's. I was 17 maybe. I liked it a lot. Just driving in the nice weather and listening to music.
I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.
Women are delicate creatures. Fragile. Gentle. Made by God to be sheltered from the harshness of this world.. Morgan MacDonnell
She thougt of sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west.
As suburbs go, Bromley's not bad. But as David Bowie and Hanif Kureishi have observed, you do want to get out of there quickly.
A prosthetic leg with a Willie Nelson bumper sticker washed ashore on the beach, which meant it was Florida. Then it got weird.
I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember.
Contrary to what we've been told, children can detect deceit in parents much easier than parents can detect deceit in children.
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
Or maybe we'll make a home somewhere inside ourselves, to carry with us wherever we go- which is the way I carry my mother now.
Suicide to them is an act of selfishness. Someone who is truly selfless does not think of himself often enough to desire death.
What?" I ask. "I'm developing a theory." "And it is?" She picks up her hamburger, grins, and says, "That you have a death wish.
You know, most boys would enjoy being trapped in close quarters with a girl." I roll my eyes. "Not claustrophobic people, Tris.
The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.
Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.
The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities.
I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.
Losing my parents really set me adrift in more ways than one. It's not just losing them. It's losing the possibility of family.
It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.
Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.
Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.
I love you. Okay? Want it louder? I LOVE YOU. Spell it out, should I? I ell-oh-vee-ee why-oh-you. Want it backward? You love I.
To read of human depravity in the police reports is one thing, to see it fall like a black shadow across one's life is another.
The tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and pitifully base, it is a meanness to calculate the difference.
A snob is that man or woman who is always pretending to be something better--especially richer or more fashionable--than he is.
in the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen
Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
Don’t become me. Don’t let her down like I did. You only deserve what you make yourself worthy of. Do what I couldn’t. Be a man.
You naked in my bed is even more unbelievably beautiful than I thought it would be... and trust me I've thought about it. A lot.
It is really a hard life. Men will not be nice to you if you are not good-looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.
You're shocked, Mr. Burton, at hearing what our gossiping little town thinks. I can tell you this - they always think the worst!
What's wrong with my proposition?" Poirot rose. "If you will forgive me for being personal-I do not like your face, M. Ratchett.
Anyone who's had a shower and hasn't ingested illegal narcotics within a couple of days stands out on a bench in the courthouse.
This thought strengthened in me my belief that all men, without exception, deserve to be pitied, if only because they are alive.
Fiction is love and hate and agreement and conflict and common adventure, not lonely musings on have-beens and might-have-beens.
A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.
I think, like, fiction has a place to understand those things that are hardest to understand that non-fiction can't ever get at.
Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn't. Shame doesn't. Being heard does.