Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
He doesn't deserve it. he can have any girl in the world's love and he took yours. someone who deserves so much more than a summer fling
To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, 'vulgar and unsafe' --- that was the worst thing.
When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.
To be excited and at the same time satisfied; to desire and possess -that has been described somewhere as the wise man's idea of heaven.
Was it Gorky who had said, "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain".
I can kid people, including myself, into believing that something on the page will work. But when you film it, you just think, "Oh ...".
Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you, and a man who swears he'll love you forever isn't finished with you until he's done.
Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.
Being human means losing everything we love best in the world," she murmured as she released me. "But would you ask to be anything else?
I was beginning to understand.My grandmother's love was cold because she was afraid of things;that was why everything had to be perfect.
I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.
The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.
As it is now, decades after 1965, the people of Indonesia have no clue about any other system except their own, or about true democracy.
The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.
People are able to live with only half a heart, to live without real compassion, because they are able to use words that are only forms.
... everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds. [p. 110]
If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death.
The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.
You have to be a warrior and say, "Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine." (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)
The problem with God - or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God - is that he or she rarely answers right away.
I feel incredibly successful. I make a living as a writer and am able to help support a big family, my church, my bleeding-heart causes.
I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others.
There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.
One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.
Fortune favors the brave; and the world certainly gives the most credit to those who are able to give an unlimited credit to themselves.
When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.
Write. Enjoy writing. Then, and only then, worry about the business end of it. Start loving your hobby, and then you can't go too wrong.
You know, I feel like my job is to write a book. Then filmmakers come and they make a movie. And they're two really different art forms.
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I'm concerned that's like accusing a dog of having a bark!
Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.
If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.
If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?
And the seriousness with which the other party takes my words always raises the doubt whether I have taken them seriously enough myself.
I'm afraid it's not much use to you, Mr. Rumblebuffin.' Not at all. Not at all.' said the giant politely. 'Never met a nicer hankerchee.
The difference [God's] timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite.
Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.
He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets.
Let us celebrate the soil. Most men toil that they may own a piece of it; they measure their success in life by their ability to buy it.
Ask her what she craved, and she'd get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom.
There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.
The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.
My mother saved hundreds of animals in her life. Wherever she encountered and injured or needy or abandoned animal, she brought it home.
Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.
When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
The rural areas have been deprived by the cities in the past. Development resources and energy should be directed where the people live.