Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they're not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.
The Oscars are like a political campaign. You have to have the right candidates, and the people in Hollywood know what they are.
Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
While Resignation gently slopes away, And all his prospects brightening to the last, His heaven commences ere the world be past.
And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.
Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty." Gideon Wyeth:"Why?" Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.
But I fear that I also underestimate the stupidity of the rest of mankind. Are we absolutely sure that we ought to win this war?
Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.
Every child needs to have for itself not only its loving parents and siblings and friends of its own age, but a grown-up friend.
You slam a politician, you make out he's the devil, with horns and hoofs. But his wife loves him, and so did all his mistresses.
I saw my bulky person in the windows of the passing storefronts and wondered, when will that man there find himself to be loved?
The reason I like Portland is the idea of going to a supermarket and knowing there's no way to be recognized. L.A. is so social.
Comedy is something that we can all share, no matter what language we speak or our background, it has the power to unite us all.
There are many kinds of truth. But truth communicated by beauty is the only pure one. The only one that touches me in the heart.
There's no reason that a writer, if they have some discipline and curiosities and passion, can't be vital for a long, long time.
Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism!
What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart.
We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.
Everywhere was singing, all over the house was singing, and outside the house was alive with singing, and the very air was song.
[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.
Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!
Leandros's favorite place had turned out not to be vegetarian, but vegan, which was for people who preferred their suicide slow.
Mark Twain said, The right word is to the nearly right word as lightning is to the lightning bug. Fill your book with lightning.
The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.
It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger.
To have suffered ... sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth and has to be learned in the fire.
Let first the onion flourish there, Rose among roots, the maiden-fair, Wine-scented and poetic soul Of the capacious salad bowl.
Have you ever head this theory about drinking yourself sober?' Eddie asked. 'It's a very popular theory. Amongst drunks, anyway.
Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.
All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
I don't think there really is much of a left in America, certainly by European standards even the left is quite right wing here.
I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.
I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.
There is the churning and the boiling of the sea, and the foam on top of it and that is what man is, churning and foam together.
If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.
I can't think of a comparable level of cultural excitement about something since Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in the 1960s.
I don't believe less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.
Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant.
I don't even remember the season. I just remember walking between them and feeling for the first time that I belonged somewhere.
Patrick started running after the sunset. And Sam immediately followed him. And I saw them in silhouette. Running after the sun.
When television captured the popular imagination of the 1950s, a rash of movies satirized Hollywood while also mythologizing it.
The only consistent narrative we possess is one that we share with every other life-form: we are born, we live, and then we die.
To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)
I think in a lot of ways, writing, when you're really in there, is like being an actress because you're in somebody else's head.
I suppose love is never a sure thing, no matter what words are spoken. Love requires a leap of faith into the abyss, every time.
It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity
Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.