Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I thought about it for awhile, hiding it from the rest of my mind. But I didn't ruin my birthday by secretly thinking about it too hard
We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.
So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.
There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.
When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.
No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.
We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.
I am not really retired, and may never be completely, but I can't think of a better place to contemplate retirement than New York City.
The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered.
I know some people see it as this success when the book is finally made into a movie - that marks its success. I don't see it that way.
I think that if we don't learn to inhabit other people's perspectives, then we're never going to understand why people do what they do.
The world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world.
The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.
I would like to give you more of my heart,but there is nothing more I can give you. I gave you everything and you crushed it into bits.
Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.
You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.
Some say that life has no form, that it is extremely diffuse. I think I can agree with them. ... A life without conclusions is painful.
I'm a huge fan of San Francisco. And I was out here for a couple years in the mid-'90s when I was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
I am surrounded by counselors. My sister is a counselor. My daughter is training to be a counselor. A lot of my friends are counselors.
In the playground, I always made people laugh; I used to charge them three pence for an impression of a teacher. It kept me in toffees.
Long after the bomb falls and you and your good deeds are gone, cockroaches will still be here, prowling the streets like armored cars.
Few of us can actually change the world. We can only change ourselves. But if enough people took that to heart, the world would change.
A wise man distrusts his neighbor. A wiser man distrusts both his neighbor and himself. The wisest man of all distrusts his government.
It is inevitable, that eventually the people will demand absolute security from the state... And absolute security is absolute slavery.
The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back.
One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.
I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.
She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.
You're the one who has to live with your choice, everyone else will get over it, move on, no matter what you decide. But you never will
People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.
I am a closet birdwatcher. I can identify Southern African species, but it irks me I can barely tell a jay from a blackbird in the U.K.
All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.
We are like icebergs in the ocean: one-eighth part consciousness and the rest submerged beneath the surface of articulate apprehension.
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
Beyond all the fires of love through which one passes there is the star of Duty, and happy the individual who can live in its serenity.
Be careful what you yearn for, because that which you desire most will either complete you or destroy you, and you don't get to choose.
The play is done; the curtain drops, Slow falling to the prompter's bell A moment yet the actor stops And looks around to say farewell.
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.
You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!
In hindsight, I must have been looking for a way to write about Jewishness that somehow managed to minimize irony and self-deprecation.
Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?