Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.
Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.
Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.
Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from?
You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.” “Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.
I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.
Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.
If a man has committed wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations.
Life is a vacation from two eternities, who wants to waste those precious years worrying about what happens when you get back to forever?
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it.
The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
She may have had enough time to deal with things. What if she does come back? What will you do?" Grant asked me. What would I do? I'd beg.
I like the idea of a place that is dealing with painful, messy, frightening, and very human events that is also so beautiful and ethereal.
I was the weirdest kid: I wanted to see the police file - in grade school! I was convinced I could crack the case if I just had that file.
Isocrates was in the right to insinuate, in his elegant Greek expression, that what is got over the Devil's back is spent under his belly.
Truth must be told-and things must change! If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen, what is the good of them?
One encounters very capable fathers abashed by their piano-playing daughters. Three measures of Schumann make them red with embarrassment.
Yer feelin's is like ras'berry vinegar: if you're skeered to use 'em an' keep on savin' 'em, first thing you know they've done 'vaporated!
Every theory in medicine, if medicine is to remain healthy, must be beaten out on the anvil of skepticism. So do we weed out charlatanism.
I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.
The Chinese government would yield to the pressure from its people: it would be forced to give orders to fight - to defend its motherland!
You want an audience. If you didn't, you wouldn't be a writer. The biggest motivation to write is the knowledge that someone will read it.
He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.
There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.
In my adult life, I had spent a lot of time angry at God, mostly over the sudden deaths in my family - my brother at 30, my daughter at 5.
My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.
We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.
Maybe it's wishful thinking, this snaggly faith of mine, or maybe it's Miles Davis saying, Don't play what's there, play what's not there.
Sam said to me the other day, "I love you like 20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops," and this is the exact same way in which I love him.
I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man that I was calling for was dead.
Serenity comes from the ability to say “Yes” to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say “No” to the wrong choices made by others.
There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.
Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down." - Mrs. Brown
He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.
But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.
I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit.
Thus human beings judge of one another, superficially, casually, throwing contempt on one another, with but little reason, and no charity.
If I think she' hot and it turns out she's a psychopath, then what does that say about me? I'm totally not ready for that kind of therapy.
It is love in old age, no longer blind, that is true love. For the love's highest intensity doesn't necessarily mean it's highest quality.
Hope E.L .James doesn't think I'm being a prankster. I really want to adapt her novels for the screen. Christian Grey is a writer's dream.
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.
Holiness is irresistible. If even 10% of the world's population had it the whole world would be converted and happy before the year's end.
Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.
I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life's short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily
Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.
Ideas? My head is full of them, one after the other, but they serve no purpose there. They must be put down on paper, one after the other.
The possibility of being as free with the camera as we are with the pen is a fantastic prospect for the creative life of the 21st century.