Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.
I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that.
The liberator who destroys my property is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free.
My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.
I'm trying to make order out of chaos, trying to find some way of rationalising the horrific things that people do or the way the world is.
This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore.
Are we to go out with trumpets and tell everything we know, just because it is true? Is there not such a thing as egotistical truthfulness?
It's better to be born lucky than rich. If you're rich, you may lose your money, but if you're born lucky, you will always have more money.
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.
Only the desert has a fascination--to ride alone--in the sun in the forever unpossessed country--away from man. That is a great temptation.
Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.
Steven Spielberg's 'The Color Purple' might as well have been about a bunch of dancing eggplants for all it has to say about black history.
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me?
Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.
I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.
He could feel her laughter against his chest, and at that moment he thought that there was no better feeling than making Emma Morley laugh.
Occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile."..' Opportunity is fleeting, experiment dangerous, and judgement difficult.
Now, I have nothing to say against uncles in general. They are usually very excellent people, and very convenient to little boys and girls.
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.
The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.
They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
The land and the ocean are living, breathing entities that supported us, clothed us, fed us, and nurtured our culture from time immemorial.
I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.
He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation, next to that which comes from heaven.
How old are you Johnny" she asked. Sixteen." And what's that-a boy or a man?" He laughed. "A boy in time of peace and a man in time of war.
Some great poet or philosopher once said that " he who goes to nature for comfort must go to her empty handed " , and I think he was right.
Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.
To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.
To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.
If you love something - let. If it is yours - it will come back. I love you not because of who you are, but for who I am when I'm with you.
It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.
As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.
Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.
Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.
I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.
Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.
I know him, February's thrush, And loud at eve he valentines On sprays that paw the naked bush Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines.
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
I watch NFL football on Sundays. I enjoy gaming with friends, meaning role-playing games; I still enjoy going to conventions and traveling.
You look pale, Sansa," Cersei observed. "Is your red flower still blooming?" "Yes" "How apt. The men will bleed out there, and you in here.
Experiences are like hoarded gold. Whenever I dole out a piece of my private suffering, that is when I get letters from all over the world.
I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.
The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.
When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.
In my early teens, science fiction and fantasy had an almost-total hold over my imagination. Their outcast status was part of their appeal.