Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.
A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.
We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother.
[He] had a hole in his soul, the kind the devil loves to find. It's like an open doorway for him, lets him enter in and do his wicked work.
The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.
Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.
We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.
Somewhere in that database my name sat in its own little niche, the name of a reject, undisciplined and worthless. Just the way I liked it.
I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying.
A young man rarely gets a better vision of himself than that which is reflected from a true woman's eyes; for God himself sits behind them.
Artists are nearest God. Into their souls he breathes his life, and from their hands it comes in fair, articulate forms to bless the world.
A man who in the struggles of life has no home to retire to, in fact or in memory, is without life's best rewards and life's best defences.
I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being--forgive me--rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.
I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.
They see Hermione as someone who is not vulnerable, but I see her as someone who does have quite a lot of vulnerability in her personality.
Even if I could, I wouldn't. Scars can come in handy. I have one myself above my left knee that is a perfect map of the London Underground.
Life, for Colin, was one long brace against pain and disappointment, and everybody apart from his wife was an enemy until proven otherwise.
I've never stunned anyone except in our D.A. lessons," said Luna, sounding mildly interested. "That was noisier than I thought it would be.
She seemed to think that one of the perks of marriage was that it gave you rights of comment and intrusion over single people's love lives.
I don't read 'chick lit,' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.
George: "I can't see anyone trying to bump off a quidditch team." Fred: "Wood might've done the Slytherins if he could've got away with it.
I’m a shallow, shallow boy. Hey, it helps that you’re pretty. It brings out the nice guy in me. Makes me what to share my cookies with you.
Fine, dandy, she thought. Then lose the shirt, peel off those leather pants, and lie down on my tile. We'll take turns being on the bottom.
I came to you, Jane. Every night this week, I came to you. I didn't want you to be alone. And I didn't want to sleep without you." -Vishous
Words become meaningless, the mind cuts itself off from reality for a little while, a necessary breathing space until one is ready to cope.
all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.
I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.
It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.
Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.
Mr. Bennet's expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment.
I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.
In war-time a man is called a hero. It doesn't make him any braver, and he runs for his life. But at least it's a hero who is running away.
You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings might be right.
Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there.
The birth mother is placing the baby out of love. I still believe that. Well, the ones we've dealt with who were actually pregnant, anyway.
You can't really compare hells. But I suppose the hell of being strung out on another person's addictive behavior is its own special thing.
On one hand, I am very pessimistic, but on the other hand, if I didn't believe that speaking up would do something, I wouldn't have spoken.
There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.
We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
I refuse to "look up." Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.
So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.
I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.
I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.
When there is in nature no fixed condition, how much less must there be in the life of a people, beings endowed with mobility and movement!