Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
She wanted—what some people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.
You are right that a man needs light like he needs bread, but a man needs a little darkness, too, if only so that he can sleep, and dream.
When you chase a dream, you learn about yourself. You learn your capabilities and limitations, and the value of hard work and persistence.
What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.
Remember: A best-selling book usually follows a simple rule, It's a wonderful story, wonderfully told; not, It's a wonderfully told story.
I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others.
'The Sisters Brothers' has endeared so many prize juries because the Western format has more of a broad appeal and is familiar to readers.
There's other ways to protect yourself and your family, Arlen. Wisdom. Prudence. Humility. It's not brave to fight a battle you can't win.
I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster When you take your pill it's like a mine disaster. I think of all the people lost inside you.
God is the great janitor of the universe. Why things don't work is that we have a janitor in charge, and we keep looking for the landlord.
This is how you hold onto your family. You hold them with open hands so they are free to find futures of their own. It's just that simple.
The kind of event on a conveyor belt that causes a fire occurs in a variety of industrial environments, not uniquely in coal environments.
Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.
The cold stars spun to the ancient rhythm, the august march of an everlasting symphony. They are old, the stars, and their memory is long.
Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home.
Out of our deepest memories come the forgotten forms of the past, given new life by the living sentience of an ancient and eternal forest.
Everyday life is a stimulating mixture of order and haphazardry. The sun rises and sets on schedule but the wind bloweth where it listeth.
There is no music like a little river's . . . It takes the mind out-of-doors . . . and . . . it quiets a man down like saying his prayers.
We call Japanese soldiers fanatics when they die rather than surrender, whereas American soldiers who do the same thing are called heroes.
All is forgiven to kings and popes. History grants them immunity, even a full pardon, even when they admit their crimes and glory in them.
Now, it's a fact well known to those who know it well that prophets of doom only attain popularity when they get the drinks in all around.
learning is never wrong. Even learning how to kill isn't wrong. Or right. It's just a thing to learn, a thing I can teach you. That's all.
Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.
As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.
The nicest characters in 'A Week in December' are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.
We cannot go backward. We cannot erase time and events. But we can go forward, hand in hand, hope in our hearts and love lighting our way.
I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.
Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave.
Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.
Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.
Writing an adaptation is not so much a collaboration as it is a series of steps. You're basically creating a blueprint for something else.
Is it the realization that people recently psychoanalyzed tend to be dreadful bores which makes the U.S.A. army reject them for the draft?
I'm a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose - I don't do succinct well, so I'm in awe of writers who do.
One seemed simply to be here, less an accumulation of moments than a single arrangement continuously gifted from some inaccessible future.
Her chin lifted. "Very well. Here is my best offer. Half of my nakedness for all of yours." He pretended to think on it. " It's a bargain.
They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.
He kept at true good humor's mark The social flow of pleasure's tide: He never made a brow look dark, Nor caused a tear, but when he died.
Ive always got a novel under way, but if I try to work on it every day, exclusively, I falter. So I always keep more than one thing going.
The phrase what I want struck me. It contains so much entitlement, so many complications, but encompasses only what a person doesn't have.
I showed up in October 1946, part of an early surge that would become a great nationwide baby boom. My sister Kathy was born a year later.
Any time one seeks to produce for a larger public one inevitably has to drop material that would only be understood by a particular group.
If we love the sea as much as we claim to we'll do everything we possibly can to keep it healthy. Otherwise we might as well take up golf.
People can make symbolic gestures but doesn't mean their life changes. One philanthropic moment doesn't make a life of renewal; of change.
In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.
When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.' 'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.
I find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.