Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.
I just need to do something new.... I've got the big remote control of life in my hands, and I'm ready to start pushing some buttons.
If a woman is really injured by her marriage, she should sue under the employer liability act. She should claim damages--not alimony.
One religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man's original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race.
There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.
Looking back, [R.E.M.]videos, by in large, have always been art films. I'm thinking of "Losing My Religion." That's a landmark piece.
Truth was, if you were going to believe something, it was best to believe in stuff that made the world seem a more interesting place.
I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.
I'm living the life I love, I tell myself, and loving the life I live. I tell myself: I deserved this. This is exactly what I wanted.
To see how boring you really are, write a book about soap and cults, and the profits you make will be your only means of subsistence.
I have a lot of fans who are in the prison system, where ramen noodles are a kind of staple. Prisoners are always sending me recipes.
When we find a ship, we turn it over to the state or federal government. It's purely historical. I've never made a dime on any of it.
It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.
When each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made.... There is only this strange recognition of present otherness.
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.
I'm ever curious about the world. I'm driven to go out and find new things to write about. Having a vivid imagination is also a plus.
We have a 'bad movie' club, and we go to whatever dumb movie is playing in the local theater, then go and have some beers and dinner.
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.
If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.
Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.
What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell.
All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.
We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.
The reader's impression is one of a dream - the only thing that's left upon waking is the memory of a melody at the end of a concert.
Don't take up a man's time talking about the smartness of your children; he wants to talk to you about the smartness of his children.
If your faith is opposed to experience, to human learning and investigation, it is not worth the breath used in giving it expression.
Our ability to turn off empathy for specific kinds of humans and then use faulty logic to justify our beliefs is messily sociopathic.
People praise us behind our backs, but we hear them not; few before our faces, and who is not suspicious of the truth of such praise?
Death is the only monastery; the tomb is the only cell, and the grave that adjoins the convent is the bitterest mock of its futility.
Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on.
No one can control his emotion of love for a woman ... the sentiment he feels, I mean, but the strong man controls the demonstration.
Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.
Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.
That's just the point: an honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business goes on eating - and then he eats you up.
Loneliness is a prerequisite for freedom. Freedom depends on the ability to reflect, and reflection can only begin when one is alone.
Life is like our game at whist ... I don't enjoy the game much, but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.
Trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing.
The worst of all hobbies are those that people think they can get money at. They shoot their money down like corn out of a sack then.
Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not.
Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less.
Solomon's Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendos.
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
There is heroism even in the circles of hell for fellow-sinners who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate.
The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist - after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.