Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.
Wit, like hunger, will be with great difficulty restrained from falling on vice and ignorance, where there is great plenty and variety of food.
I will live and die by this testimony: that I loved a good conscience; that I never invaded another man's liberty; and that I preserved my own.
The American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart, that man is Nathaniel Hawthorne.
As a rule, only the poor are generous. Rich people can always find excellent reasons for not handing over twenty thousand francs to a relative.
The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper of a new rule.
Society proceeds like the ocean. After a disaster, it resume its wonted level and rhythms; its devouring interests efface all traces of damage.
We do not wish success yet we obtain it. Always we find what we are not looking for. These words are too true not to become a proverb some day.
Among fifty percent of your married couples, the husband worries very little about what his wife is doing, provided she is doing all he wishes.
By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct.
On the other hand it was bad manners to look a gift horse in the mouth. Even if you're getting it from an overweight cracker in a fringe shirt.
It was the kind of place you went when your earthly troubles became too much for you and you were looking for a creative way to commit suicide.
What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.
The inspiration can come in such small ways that if you sit there just waiting for the big epiphany you'll sit there for the rest of your life.
'True Detective' was the last show I got crazy about, with its 'Silence of the Lambs'-style landscape and those strip mall badlands of America.
Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.
In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.
The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.
I softly sink into the bath of sleep: With eyelids shut, I see around me close The mottled, violet vapors of the deep, That wraps me in repose.
His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.
Never," said Hagrid irritably, "try an' get a straight answer out of a centaur. Ruddy stargazers. Not interested in anythin' closer'n the moon.
Amazing, how much more difficult it was to extend his arm twelve inches and touch her hand than it was to snatch a speeding Snitch from midair.
If anyone wanted ter find out some stuff, all they’d have ter do would be ter follow the spiders. That’d lead ‘em right! That’s all I’m sayin’.
Andrew hated to see her humiliated and pathetic like this; but he half hated her too for landing herself in it, when any idiot could have seen.
Stone dead," said Howard, as though there were degrees of deadness, and the kind that Barry Fairbrother had contracted was particularly sordid.
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
I shattered that memory by going back there. Without realizing it until it was too late, I replaced that memory with the emptiness of that day.
Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing.
Last night I walked clear down to Times Square & just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost - it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.
His friends said, "Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?" and Bull said, "I like it because it's ugly." All his life was in that line.
Well, first you have to be very, very funny. I have realized that it is essential for a boy to be funny. Otherwise, what is the point in a boy?
This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.
To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.
Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.
Every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species.
An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy.
I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.
There is only one thing that makes any one athlete better than another, his heart. We all put our underwear on feet first, so we are all human.
No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.
One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.
My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.
I am sorry to tell you that I am getting very extravagant and spending all my money: and what is worse for you, I have been spending yours too.
My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them──by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.
Our mission in life is not to discover our fate as we go along, or even to procreate, but rather to fill up the endless gray void that is time.
I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.
A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe, a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.
A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe; a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.
I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.
I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.