Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.
In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.
The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down." -The Judge
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego ... things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.
Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.
The final aim is not to know, but to be.... You've got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. "Be yourself" is the last motto.
The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification ofthe spirit.
While medicine creates material for writing, perhaps even more important is that it also creates a psychological and emotional need to write.
Her writing was her only escape, her only means of survival. It was a respite from a cruel world, despite seemingly comfortable surroundings.
The draining away of James Baldwin's magic was a drama much discussed in the years leading up to his death in 1987 at the age of sixty-three.
The history of black people in Manhattan is a story of people getting pushed farther uptown as land acquires new uses and increases in value.
I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one.
Invite characters of surprising and moral character, or at least those who grapple with what is right or those who make decisions that shock.
We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.
sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life 'outside' the story changes the story.
Now it's like a fog has lifted. I sense Leetu just as clearly as I can see the moon.' Your eyes are closed, and the moon as a haze around it.
If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.
Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.
Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.
For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.
Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
Unfortunately being born princess doesn't autimatically make a girl graceful or confident, a fact I've lamented for most of my fourteen years
I was born on the same day as Edgar Allan Poe and Dolly Parton: January 19. I am absolutely certain that this affects my writing in some way.
One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.
I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.
There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.
Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, 'Crank,' with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.
Now, a lot of early VR worlds or universes that are coming online take inspiration from 'Ready Player One.' It's just the coolest thing ever.
The sisters worked from dawn to dusk. One of them was an idiot; she started shaving her legs and marrying tax inspectors, so she was no good.
don't be angry with the gentleman for thinking, whatever be the cause, for I assure you he makes no common practice of offending in that way.
I very seldom, during my whole stay in the country, heard a sentence elegantly turned, and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American.
Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything.
It is always so, when we are unhappy we feel more strongly the unhappiness of others; our feeling is not shattered, but becomes concentrated.
You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.
I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.
It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.
The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
Women know no perfect love: Loving the strong, they can forsake the strong; Man clings because the being whom he loves Is weak and needs him.
Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
It's different for every writer. It's not a career for anyone who needs security. It's a career for gamblers. It's a career of ups and downs.
There has never been a slave who did not choose to be a slave. Their choice may be between bondage and death, but the choice is always there.
For herself, she wanted sleet and ice, howling winds, thunder to shake the very stones of the Red Keep. She wanted a storm to match her rage.
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
It's as if I've arrived in a place where it's all spirit and no body -- an overwhelming sense of calm . . . I actually began to feel blessed.
Every Hebrew should look upon his Faith as a temple extending over every land to prove the immutability of God and the unity of His purposes.
I like to think Im a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions.
...I remain restless and dissatisfied; what I knot with my right hand, I undo with my left, what my left hand creates, my right fist shatters